This didn’t used to be the case, starter cartridges used to be the same size if not a little bigger than standard cartridges because the expectation was they wanted you to buy the printer be impressed with how efficient it was and buy more ink.

The problem with that was, printers were too reliable, people weren’t buying new printers anymore they were only buying the ink so what they did in return was lowered the price of the printers to try to incentivize buying a new printer.

But then people realized well the ink is so expensive that I can just buy a whole new printer which would be the upgraded form and not have to worry about buying ink, which meant no one was buying their ink anymore

So as such they made it so starter cartridges have Jack crap for ink to try to disincentivize the same thing that they incentivized in the first place.

Then of course like every good thing in the world, some executive realize that they could just lower the reliability of the printer and make it a piece of junk, which will accomplish the same effects. But by that time the consumers were used to having nothing for ink and printers anyway so why would they go out of their way to add more ink in the starter cartridges when people were buying it with little to no ink in the starter cartridges, which is how we got to where we are today. Thankfully the laser printer company is while our starting to go in that direction haven’t quite become as bad.

TLDR? ; inkjet companies are greedy cash hogs, and was willing to lose a little bit of face in order to make some money. Buy a laser printer, the base cost is quite a bit more, but the toner cartridges last forever and they are significantly more reliable