When buying your first car, would you pay extra to get a worse car so you have to learn mechanics in addition to learning how to drive? :)

It’s definitely about finding the least bad printer if shopping the budget stuff, they all have issues as you say. Personally I think it’s best to buy the printer which is the least likely to have severe design and/or manufacturing flaws and focus on learning how to get good prints out of it. When you’re a complete beginner it’s difficult to know if your print turns out bad because you’re doing something wrong or if it’s caused by a hardware issue.