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There are two different methods of providing ink, typified by HP on the one hand, and the older Epson printers on the other.

HP, along with Canon and also Lexmark before they left the market provide you with a cartridge which includes the print head.Every time you change the cartridge, you also change the print head. This makes the cartridges much more complex (and expensive), but at least should maintain print quality over the lifetime of the printer.

Epson and Brother cartridges are buckets of ink, and if you go back to the late '90s, that's literally all they were. Plastic boxes filled ink, sometimes with foam to control the ink, together with the required holes to let the ink out. More recently, they've had a small amount of electronics in them, supposedly to allow the cartridge to monitor how much ink is left, but actually IMHO to try to make sure that you only use genuine cartridges.

I currently have an Epson R1800 photo printer that takes a T054X cartridges. I have cartridges from other Epson printers. I've recently found that the physical cartridge from another printer designated T06XX (i.e. the next generation of printer) will fit in the R1800, but the electronics prevent the cartridge from being recognised properly. This strikes me as being a blatant artificial control of the post sale ink market.

I kept a Stylus 1160, and before that a Stylus 880 (both models without electronics in the cartridge) going for a many years as my always-on network attached printers, because the ink was (comparatively) just so cheap. The 880 eventually had some print nozzles permanently blocked regardless of how I cleaned it, and the 1160 developed a power supply problem. That's when I picked up the R1800, hoping it to be similar. Unfortunately not.

So it sounds as if Epson are going to go back to their old method of making the printer everything, and the cartridges/ink tanks nothing other than reservoirs for the ink. Great. Just don't push the printer price up too high for artificial reasons.