Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers".
I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
I purchased it in August 2021 and the demo toner it came with ran out this week.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B079Z44VZ7
Toner is like £40 which works out at like £3.30 a month