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.
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.