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.
How well does it work in practice? Well on my Epson ET4500 I get a few clogged jets every two or three months, but running a cleaning cycle has always cleared them. A bottle full of black Epson ink costs about £7.50 and seems to last about 1000-1500 pages. Colour has the same price, but I don't use enough colour to estimate low long it lasts. There seem to be several alternative ink suppliers.
This isn't a universal recommendation, just a response to your specific points. There is a premium for the tank models, so whether they are worth it depends on the amount that you print.