Consider the web in 1994

More importantly: it made it possible to use less-precisely cut pieces of wood. Human-made.

Machines may cut wood much more precisely, but it's easier to make them cut large flat surfaces, rather than more complicated pieces used before.

That also helps and, again, it's much harder to create something very precisely uniform from soft wood by hand.

Thus to make the finishing part less expensive and produce less robust result we need much more stable and robust “foundational technology”.

It's the same thing everywhere: ENIAC did 5000 operations per second and it's longest operational time between failures was 116 hours. That's about 3 billion operations. Not enough for any modern app to even reach the point where it would be ready to accept input from the user.

Before we could start using “why write ten lines of code if we could plug framework with million lines of code and then only add one line on top of that mess” modern approach hardware designers had to design extremely robust hardware.

Indigenous? Made in these developing countries locally? Hard to believe.

All the indigenous furniture that I ever saw in developing countries were much more structurally sound and sophisticated, even if they were made from tufts of straw or gnarly pieces of wood. They have to made that way, if you would try to build something from these flimsy pieces using steel bolt and tension it would fall apart at the first attempt to use it!

I assume the same only I know that these awful piles of Chineese-made plastic pieces haven't existed back then. They are very much also products of modern technology, just even cheaper and worse ones than what western people may afford.

But these carefully crafted things made from straws and gnarly woods? They had to exist for centuries, for people that are making these usually are not advanced enough to invent something like this from scratch (and do that uniformly in different villages, to boot)!