Even if you take trust out of the picture, this sort of nonsense leads to a crummy user experience. The customer needs to download and run an installer, accept

Even if you take trust out of the picture, this sort of nonsense leads to a crummy user experience. The customer needs to download and run an installer, accept a license agreement and configure a bunch of options that have nothing to do with the primary function of the hardware, then they can configure the actual hardware. In the end the user will usually end up interacting with vendor specific (or even model specific) software to manage the printer or configure print jobs. None of that is truly necessary. Microsoft can detect hardware and provide plenty of drivers under their operating system. The typical desktop Linux distribution can do the same. In both cases, the key are licensing agreements that allow for it. Those licensing agreements are much more flexible if the software isn't collecting analytics (either for telemetry or marketing).