"That Brother printer" will cost you more (and be Yet Another Plastic Thing To Go To A Landfill Later), but will ... print every time. Sure, after a while you might need to clean the rollers or something, but at least you know it will be that and not some random bricking.
About the random bricking though… While this printer doesn't actually brick itself, it does have a very curious failure state where if you leave it off, but plugged into the mains, it will eventually refuse to boot up until you unplug it, wait for ten minutes, and plug it back in. No error message, no blinking lights, nothing to indicate that something is wrong, just nothing until you let it reset itself by removing the power cable for a while. I just leave it unplugged most of the time now.
With traditional ink printers, yes.
With the new tank-based printers? No. That advice no longer holds.
Tank-based printers separate out the tank that holds the ink from the nozzle that sprays the ink. This allows the printer to fully seal off the tank when the printer is not in use, preventing the ink from drying up. The traditional ink cartridges are not able to do that, which is what causes so much frustration and wastage.
I have a few clients with the tank-based printers, and these products seem to have solved the last major objections against inkjet printers. FWIHS, they tend to work quite well.
So yeah, the advice to never buy an inkjet - it's true but not disastrously true all the time.
Consumer printers? Sure. Highly likely. That stuff was designed to be disposable.
Business-class or Enterprise-class printers that had been used in larger offices or have low page counts? A much lower probability.
The business/enterprise stuff is meant to last because they cost a lot going out the door, and so are built robustly. You just have to ensure either a low page count, or some sort of proof that the machine had been serviced regularly by properly-certified printer techs.
Yes, it is still possible to get a lemon. But if you live somewhere with any sort of a significant metro region, you only need a little patience to find older pre-DRM hardware that is still performing well.
I have had a second-hand 4050DTN for about two decades now (liquidation sale, IIRC), and while it’s hurting for a maintenance kit (already have one, albeit in storage somewhere), it’s still running very well in all other aspects.
On the large format side, OG DesignJet 750Cs were pretty dang serviceable for the longest time. The first one I had to repair took a good day or so to disassemble/reassemble, but the next 2 I was able to handle in the second half of a workday.
(Also, they're built better than the newer ones)
I do not live in a place that can fit an “enterprise” printer though, and I think for many people living in apartments it’s a bit of an ask. But it’s also pretty dependent on both the value of the surface area required to you and your printing needs.
My latest one is a brother printer that I bought on Craigslist.
