For years I judged every desk the same way I judged a dining table, which meant I walked past a lot of perfectly good ones muttering about particleboard. Wrong standard. A desk mostly holds a laptop and your elbows, not a Thanksgiving spread, and once I accepted that, I started finding ones I actually liked.
When you're looking at one in a shop, or the day it shows up in a box, check the bits that take the punishment first. Push down on the top near the back edge, away from the legs, and see if it flexes or booms like a drum, that tells you whether there's real bracing underneath or just a sheet of something thin pretending to be sturdy. Pull any drawer all the way out and look at the runners, metal ball bearing slides will still glide smoothly in ten years, the plastic ones get gritty and start to stick about the time you've forgotten what you paid. Look at how the legs attach, bolted into a solid block or a metal plate is fine, legs screwed straight into chipboard with nothing to spread the load will work loose, and you'll be hunting for a hex key every few months to keep the thing from wobbling when you type.
How it ages depends almost entirely on the top. A laminate or veneer surface will look fine for a long time if you're not dragging mugs across it without a coaster, but a ring from a hot cup or a scrape from a stapler edge is there for good, you can't sand that out. Solid wood tops, the kind you find on some of the better small desks, pick up marks too, but you can sand and refinish them, which is the whole point of real wood, it ages instead of just wearing out. Metal desks are the ones I trust least for looks and most for durability, a powder coated steel frame will outlive the rest of your furniture and shrug off a dropped coffee, it just doesn't warm up a room the way wood does. Wipe spills up quickly regardless of the top, keep it out of direct sun if it's a dark finish, and don't use the drawers as a filing cabinet for things three times heavier than they're rated for.
Where a nice desk is the wrong call is anywhere you're also going to eat lunch, rest your feet, or let a toddler use it as a drum kit, that's a job for something tougher and cheaper. And if you're tight on space, don't buy a desk before you've measured the chair pulled all the way out, that's the mistake I see people make constantly.
Whatever you're looking at, check the underside before you check the price tag.
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