> I fear each of their competitors is just as bad.
I can't speak to current practices, as my current Brother printer is now 7 years old and is still on its second toner cartridge. It's a B&W laser with wifi, a duplexer, and whatever discovery stuff that iDevices need to find and print to it driverless.
It replaced a very similar Brother printer that had gotten a solid 10 years of service, and which I chose to replace rather than repair when the fuser died mostly because I wanted the iDevice affordances.
Both of those printers also worked smoothly from Linux desktops, too, thanks to pretty good PostScript emulation.
Maybe they've gone to crap now, but I'm optimistic that if I needed another B&W laser, something like their current HL-2350DW or HL-2370DW would provide a similarly inexpensive, no-bullshit experience now.
The thing that worked for me was giving up on color printing. The supplies for that are eye-wateringly expensive IMO, and I seldom really need it. Last time I had a color printer at home, it was an Epson ink jet of some description, and my color prints were so infrequent that sometimes the cartridge would dry out after a few dozen pages. And worst of all, it'd refuse to do B&W prints if one of the colors was dry. I decided I'd just go to Kinko's if I needed a color document, or to one of several drug stores that lets you print photos if I needed photos. Black and White lasers are stable. Taking apart my Brother, it is extremely similar to the Canon engines from the 1980s. Which were themselves extremely similar to photocopiers that have been in production since quite a bit earlier than that.
B&W laser printing is such a well-solved problem, if you can stand to go with that you can save yourself a ton of aggravation and quite a bit of money.