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.
Just as a thought experiment, what about the other way round, where you could only rent a printer, fully serviced, as an appliance? Surely, this kind of business wouldn't be sustainable with this kind of tech with consumables running out every now and then, things breaking at any possible instance, non-replaceable consumables, etc. Follows, in addition to all this vendors are off-loading considerable hassles onto the "customer" (or rather, those who have no way around these offerings) to enable this scheme.
Suggested title for a fictitious article on the matter, "If the IBM 1401 had been built like a modern printer".