I got a table and some chairs from Torbjørn Afdal, Darby series that's designed in the 1960s with Brazilian Rosewood. It's not too expensive at ~2000€ and it's a nice, well built table, and extendable for when you host an event, but having to worry about damaging the table vs some IKEA table you don't really care about makes me prefer cheap furniture just for the ease of mind.

Okay, but if I compare my Ingo to Pfister’s Riverside the first thing I notice is this:

I very early on made a very conscious decision that I wouldn’t put much effort into keeping it in pristine condition and would instead allow it to develop some character; if some liquid leaves a stain by embedding itself into the wood, then that would be a part of the tables story. Burnmarks? The same. And not only does that attitude make you much more relaxed, it gives the table character and it has been dealing with it very well. When I wanted to have a power-strip in the middle of the room I just screwed it to the underside of the table and brought the cable with some cable-holders that I nailed into it, to one of its feet and have been extremely happy with that ever since.

Very few people, and I am very much not one of them, would be comfortable taking that kind of approach with a ≈1000€ table and I can assure you that I would be less happy for it.

And yes, I care about the table being reasonably durable (which it is), but it being cheap is a feature beyond price too, and the largely untreated pine from which it is made is something that I like: I really enjoyed the smell that it had when it was still new.