I think hp and windows rotted the way you view drivers, what I call drivers are just what your computer use to communicate with devices, they aren’t software suite that updates and ask for your account, drivers are like 2kb text files with a index of available function and what signal to sent to the printer for it to print, what you see as drivers is the heavy and predatory spyware they ship with printer to steal your data and make you spend more miney, when you install a printer on linux (especially brother) you are just getting the little file with the printer’s language, depending on your distro, it will give you a big ass list of available drivers to use with the printer you just connected, it won’t ever ask you to update or even try to communicate with the internet, since it’s a passive file that your computer use and not a program that is launched, those files are available on windows btw, the manufacturers just make them very hard to get for obvious reasons, and windows itself will install the spyware as if it’s a driver through windows update, one of the many reason I fucked off of it

You always need a driver. What you don’t want is a driver that’s malware. Brother is the best brand in that regard, but unfortunately becoming worse too.