I suspect the real story is that per-device drivers allow you to patch around a lot of stupid or wrong behavior on the hardware side, and on the low end, let the host do most of the image processing so the printer itself can be little more than a bag of dumb stepper motors and servos.
When Apple convinced printer manufacturers to support AirPrint in 2010, iOS wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous. You can find a fair amount of printers that support Google Cloud Print natively.
EDIT:
After reading a little bit more. It really is the fault of the vendors. MS tried to simplify it.
https://blog.thinprint.com/the-new-microsoft-v4-printer-driv...
One advantage Apple had was that printers had to be compatible with AirPrint without drivers for them to work on iOS, the Mac was able to piggyback off of that.
In this time I have had enough inexplicable printer-related problems, that my views on printing are no longer fit for a public forum. If I could, I would go Office Space on each and every one of those hellish machines.
But I need to remember, it's not the printer's fault, it's Windows - on GNU/Linux, printing has Just Worked(tm) for me for the last ... about ten years. Once upon a time I was reduced to converting my print jobs to the printer's native language with Ghostscript and then cat(1) the resulting files (one per page) to the printer's device file. But then came CUPS, and while some people still complain that GNU/Linux is not suitable for desktop use, when it comes to printing the experience is lightyears ahead of Windows.
I have three printers at home (long story). I bring a Mac home, connect it to my network and it finds all three and I can immediately start printing. I bring home a Windows PC, I have to install printer drivers for three printers.
Well, guess what - vendor-supplied drivers suck donkey-balls, while third-party drivers (as supplied by CUPS or GhostScript) focus on supporting the functionality the printer in question provides and nothing else.
It's the same as with GPUs, except that printers are (AFAICT) less complicated than GPUs.
In theory, Windows can do some things you can not replicate on GNU/Linux and/or macOS without major pain - e.g. that client submit their print jobs in b/w unless specifically requested otherwise (because on our support contract, color printing costs ~10x as much per page as b/w). In practice, though, it works about as reliably as trying to photograph a specific star in the sky while blindfolded and with - at best - a fuzzy idea what day it is.
People keep telling me that Windows is a superior OS for desktop systems because it "just works", but clearly those people do not do a lot of printing. ;-)
In general though I agree, it's a mess and as a developer of output management software it causes me no end of problems.
I make sure the printer supports AirPrint and "it just works" with Macs, and my IOS devices -- including my ancient circa 2010 iPad that hasn't seen an update in 7 years (yeah I got a newer iPad also).