I sympathize with this sentiment, I hate printers. Worked in a copy shop for a time. Hate em.

But there has been at least 1 good printer, and HP made it: - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_5

Also, 9-pin dot matrix printers were workhorses.

HP used to make amazing monochrome laser printers. I can't really speak to other brands, but I maintained dozens of LaserJet 4000, 4050, and 4100 printers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_LaserJet_4000_series

Those things are tanks. Perform a maintenance kit on one of those, and it's good for another 150k pages no problem. The main thing that needs attention is the rubber feet that pick up the paper get dry. Some rubber rejuvenator on a q-tip goes a long way.

I have a 4050 for home, and I have no reason to doubt its future longevity. :-)

The firmware, though, is ancient (telnet, and a web interface that requires IE 5 IIRC). Now if there was open source firmware for these things...

I think it's more printer _software_ that sucks. But we have three LaserJet M553 printers that have functioned perfectly. I think that model only recently went out of production and can still be found on the shelf.

I have a sharp mx c301w color laser printer at the office and it's frankly just great. Scanning, printing and whatever just work.

At home I have an Epson ET-M3170, it's not a laser but one of those epson thing where you don't have cartride but just empty bottles of ink into a tank when it's empty, and it works great too (it's much slower, but then again it's a lot cheaper).

It's mostly inkjet printers that are always terrible.

Brother Laser MFCs have been good for me for 15+ years.