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.