What’s the current state of the art in 3d printers willing to spend 1k+. Is there an authoritative site for hardware?
I'm hesitant to recommend any because I've only used the VORON Trident but if you search around you're bound to find alternatives.
Prusa's Core One could be a better option for print farms because Prusa is great at building printers for that kind of constant abuse. But for everyone else it's just a worse version of the Bambu X1C.
However Bambu has gotten a lot of flak for their recent software changes. They have promised not to do anything evil with the currently released printers and to give customers escape hatches. But they are certainly at a moment where consumer trust is justifiably low, and it will take some time to grow that trust back
There's some drama now around them closing up the ecosystem and locking out third party firmware, etc. but I honestly could care less so long as it stays good at being a printer.
For an off the shelf product probably Bambu Lab.
I’m all for building something that offers an advantage, but it seems neither cheaper nor offering any better quality (and, if you build it poorly or use a poor quality kit, it’ll have substantially worse quality).