The same chemical formaldehyde is responsible for the off-gassing from cheap furniture. That smell of chipboard (also called particleboard) that all the new cheap furniture is made of.
The funny thing is that the furniture really isn't that cheap. I built a couple 3-drawer desks for a couple grand kids (48 x 16 inch top) out of solid wood with 1/4 inch plywood around the drawer unit, and only spent $130 on materials (this was at the beginning of the school year). Most flat-pack desks you see are starting around $350 or higher, for garbage board.
Nah, wooden stuff usually has thicker walls/everything, usually weighting significantly more. I guess we compare some old wooden furniture with similarly designed ikea particle board one.
If its 1:1 then yes particle board should weight a bit more.
That is something that really surprised me, how light this "real wood" desk was (made from Poplar wood), compared to another similar desk that the wife bought a few months earlier (before the covid at-home back-to-school rush caused a desk shortage).
How much were your tools and how long have you trained and learned? And the sweat equity...I'm a woodworker too and it's incredibly faster to buy anything that to build it oneself.
I grew up with my Dad doing woodworking, so I picked up a lot from there. For tooling, I don't have a lot -- My Dad's old table saw when he got a new one, a compound miter saw, drill, hand held router, and recently acquired a pocket-hole jig.
For this particular project we were under pressure, so I picked up the wood from a big-box store a couple nights before the grand-kid started remote kindergarten. The next day took about 3 hours to cut the boards (1 hour), drill pocket holes (1 hour), and assemble the unit (1 hour) (minus drawers). Since I hadn't done drawers before, it took probably another 4 hours to bang out 3 drawers (each a different size). But that all was all "fun time", I had already put in my 8 hours of work, and doing shop work is a good distraction and this gave me a worth-while project. The wife ended up doing the stain and finishing (about an hour or so applying it, and a day or so to dry).
I ended up doing another one, where I took more time to do multiple coats of Danish oil (steel-wool treatment on the last couple coats), so I have a bit more time in that one.
This design was originally supposed to have plywood on the inside of the seating portion, so that's why the pocket holes are visible. Turned out it was strong enough without it, so if I do another one I'll add additional 1x2 boards on the inside framing in that section, and taper the legs to make it look better.
Not the person you're asking, but also a woodworker. If you just want a basic table, you can put one together crazy fast with the right tools.
Not counting milling time, because if this wasn't my job, I wouldn't have a jointer and planer, I've put together a basic bench in an afternoon, which is fundamentally the same construction as a joined table. It would take longer for sure without a router to cut the mortises and a table saw to cut the tenons, but probably still only a day. If you put a gun to my head and made me pick only one of those, I'd keep the router.
I built a staked table for my partner entirely by hand (including milling the top) last April, and had that pretty well put together in a week. I didn't have a way to turn the tenons, so that part was a very slow and iterative process. That I did twice, because I kind of botched it the first time and had my rake and splay pretty inconsistent. Fortunately, I left the legs long.
If you want even faster (and can hide the holes as part of the design) then pocket holes can get the framing together really fast. They have good tensile strength, and decent bending strength in one direction but not the other. So your design has to account for that, however for putting together a basic desk (see the plans in my Reddit thread I linked in the other comment), or the carcass for a dresser unit, they work wonderfully (even if it is "cheating" a bit).
Being patient and buying used is entirely the way to go for furniture. I'm typing up this comment sitting at a nearly perfect condition solid oak desk my girlfriend found at an estate sale and paid $100 for. In a similar story, we found our vintage solid wood pineapple bed for $35 on craigslist. There's no way you could buy, let alone make, either of these pieces for 10x the price.
In a past life I owned a full size metal tanker desk I bought $40, stripped down to bare metal and I loved that desk until I had to give it up when I moved countries.
People don't like buying used, but furniture doesn't wake up one morning refusing to work because a dependency is no longer available.
The irony is that a lot of people throw away good furniture made from real wood to buy IKEA particle board. As a result of which I can acquire good solid furniture from charity shops and online classifieds for close to nothing.