Some Epson printers are programmed to stop working after a certain amount of use
Waste ink pads are a necessary evil for inkjet printers. Cheap home printers don't get use replaceable ink pads for cost reasons. The Epson Workforce line that uses high capacity ink pouches does (they're called "maintenance boxes"). I don't get the outrage in the article, as filling the ink pad even in consumer printers takes tens of thousands of pages, even hundreds of thousands for sprinter used multiple times a day that doesn't need to flush ink.