Are there other flat pack furniture brands? I did not know this. I had all IKEA up until I started replacing IKEA with already-built pieces from garage sales/ furniture stores/ family.
Maybe I have just gotten unlucky, and fallen in the tail end of their defects.
Sauder is the only other one I know of. Their stuff seems to be pretty well designed and of good quality, though I wish they were more unapologetic about being fiberboard, as I'm not a huge fan of fake wood textures.
As a counter point, ikea furniture works well enough for most loads but I have a chest of drawers and the bottom of the drawers is made from something similar to a less stiff version of masonite. for clothes it would be fine but for anything else the bottom of the drawers bends and scrapes the next drawer when opening. I need to retrofit the bottom to something worthwhile.
I've also never encountered those issues mentioned with Ikea furniture and have had them with others. I'm not sure if they were technically "flat-pack," but many years prior to seeing or knowing what an Ikea is, I've assembled things like computer desks and TV stands. They all had the issues described: lament peels off, too flimsy.
There are (from searching) several supplies of cheap, flatpack furniture for landlords, which probably explains why half the properties I rented as a student had the same furniture, made of 5mm thick hardboard and bits of plastic. That stuff didn't even hold together properly when it was new, let alone a couple of years old.
Habitat should be decent quality. MFI used to be a major retailer of flat-pack stuff, but they went bankrupt in 2015. My parents bought almost everything for the kids' rooms from MFI. None of it is broken, 15-25 years later.
That wardrobe's not really a flatpack, though. Last time I looked, Argos's flatpacks were similarly priced to IKEA's, though I haven't really looked in a while.
Maybe I have just gotten unlucky, and fallen in the tail end of their defects.