Was your friend using os9 or something? Until it finally bit the dust last week I had a 10 year old Brother printer (MFC 7440 or something like that) that worked fine on both Windows and Mac versions up through High Sierra
Can't remember it exactly. Is already a year ago. It was some kind of color laser and the latest OS X at that time. The support forums were full of posts describing the same issue and the (only) unofficial solution was to fiddle with ither drivers or a generic PS and sonehow be lucky to make color printing work again. I gave up after an hour or two.
IMHO, those are mostly personal experiences that lead to preferred manufacturers. For each story where one tells you he never had any issue you'll find one that for sure had issues.