Printers were the bane of my existence when I was responsible for maintaining a small business's computer stuff. They all ran shitty Windows PCs with varying versions. One day one of the accountant's computers started crashing on boot, and after a hell of a long time, I found that some Epson printer driver had set a registry key that didn't revert upon uninstallation, and that crippled the machine.

I wonder if in your case, your old printer relied on either 32-bit kernel extensions (I don't know if that's a thing), or if it relied on one of the deprecated Kernel Programming Interfaces such as IOUSBFamily. I also wonder if a printer driver falls into a category of deprecated extensions that are silently reported by the OS, because most do pop up an alert of some kind.

https://developer.apple.com/support/kernel-extensions/