Making do is a good alternative to today's rampant consumerism

As someone who can often be found darning socks or glueing broken furniture or jewellery, and who gets all his books from secondhand book stores and all his clothes from Value Village, an article on the art, or rather the philosophy, of making do was bound to catch my attention.
We seem to be living in a disposable age of built-in obsolescence. Resourcefulness, and making the most out of resources, is not a valued attribute in this day and age. The article mentions in passing a few eye-popping statistics about our shopping behaviour: the average Canadian buys about 70 new pieces of clothing each year, only 10 of which get recycled through thrift stores; the average article of British women's clothing gets worn just seven times before being discarded; Canadians spend about $9,000 a year on consumer packaged goods, about twice as much as we did 25 years ago; we replace our smartphones every 25 months on average; average Canadian homes have doubled in size over the last generation, despite the average family size shrinking. And remember, these are just averages: correcting for people like me, who do mend and make do and don't really care much how scruffy I look, then many others must be leading a ridiculously profligate and wasteful life.
One solution to this madness may be the trendy Marie Kondo method of decluttering, although this does not seem to preclude buying new things at the same rate as before, and may lead to even more wastefulness than currently. And asking "does this item spark joy in me?" seems like a particularly ludicrous benchmark by which to judge things - some things just need to be useful and effective; they don't have to bring me joy.
Making do is a much more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking whether something brings me joy, all I need ask is "does it fulfill its intended use for me?" It is about using things well, using them up, making them perform to their limits. It also reduces the urge to buy things we don't really need, and teaches us to think about the real value of things. It's also the environmentally responsible solution to owning "stuff". Oh, yes, and it saves us money.
It behooves us, then, to ask "do we really need that new car, that new computer?" when the old one still works fine. It behooves us to get a little more mileage out of clothes, furniture and appliances. And don't even get me started on kids' toys... We don't have to take it to extremes - any extreme behaviour is almost certainly ill-advised or at least unsustainable. But putting a bit more thought into what we buy and what we throw away can help the planet, and it can help us too. And if I and my 24-year old daughter can do it, it can't be that hard.