I wouldn't mind printing out a paper (as in academic paper) to read and add notes while building things, since I would need to take hand written notes anyway and to avoid having the screen on all the time or to read outside when the weather is nice.

My experience with printers is keeping me from it. It feels like a market for lemons, the cheap ones are obviously crap, but who is to say that an expensive printer will be any better, especially with all the silly strategies the bean counters are using to squeeze the last bit of revenue out of the consumer. Reading the other comments, HP seems to be the company to avoid (My last cheap laser printer from them, P1006, was reasonably good though, it just doesn't support duplex and I won't run around with double the paper that's needed)

On the distance learning bit: My old iPad I used in college and grad school was great. When I had a bunch of readings to go through, I did prefer it to printing for the lower cost, synced notes, less to carry, better for the environment bits.

Now that I don't have any class notes and assignments, I would really like a printer for the once a month 30-50 pages duplex prints. Especially since my iPad is essentially a brick now that it can't access my Safari saved pages or iCloud Drive and can't install Firefox – yes it's old, but it would work fine except for software, so I'm not getting a new one.

With learning at home, we are using the printer 100x more than normal.

I'm curious to hear why. I can't think of any reason to use a printer (not implying your usage is invalid, just saying I can't think of what it might be).

Because paper is such a great medium for some tasks. Every day we print out the list of assignments my kids have, and they can check them off as they do them. They have several writing assignments which we print off and they write by hand. (my kids are in kindergarten and second grade - too young to be good at typing so a pencil is clearly better for writing tasks)