I don't agree on the cost cutting argument: preparing a wall of exposed brick is certainly more expensive than simply slapping another coat of paint onto it, industrial artefacts of the past have become sought after items and are selling at good prices, and what has once been available as barely designed, locally produced base-line products is now selling as designer items.

I'd argue, the element of cultural alignment to the universally accepted is predominant, regardless of the price.

(As often, the simple, DIY-style, apparently cheap, is actually more costly. As a fancy example, once VW/Audi sold the same platform twice, once as the more elaborate Audi 80, once as the more base-line, economic VW Passat. Both variants shared the same dashboard with minor variations: the Audi came with sleek control lights behind a smooth cover, whereas the Passat exhibited its economic appeal by a group of bare lamps in the cavities of a basic, moulded plastic base board. However, the Audi dashboard was considerably cheeper to produce, with just a printed sheet of plastic snapping onto the mounts, while the economic appeal of the Passat afforded lights of varying color and a complex moulding of the plastic inlays.)

Eventually all the good wood will be "reclaimed" and you'll start to see synthetic replicas and "genuine reclaimed wood look" hollow plastic panels.

It's not the age of average, it's the age of utility.

Economic convergence is actually one of the themes in the article. It's possible that much of aesthetic uniqueness stemmed/stems from being in an economically inefficient situation, where you don't know or don't have access to the solution that's "globally optimal" in some sense.

Many things can be crushed by efficiency. If every work and business has to solve some inefficiency (which seems to be true even in a communist-type system), in an optimal world you starve to death.

Still, there are many ways to use reclaimed and used stuff that won't look Instagrammy.