That's terrible. I've had my Brother laser printer for 14 years now, and it keeps on trucking. I have only replaced the toner twice and do use 3rd party toner. However, I do note that it says that the toner is empty well before it is actually empty (like months or even years if you don't print often).
I wonder if that's the old "take the toner cartridge out and tilt it back in forth a few times" issue of toner getting unevenly distributed in the cartridge?
Not everything is designed to run all the way empty.
Running your car at a very low fuel level is hard on the fuel pump - it has to work hard to slurp up what few drops are left - and on many newer models if you actually run it dry the consequences can range from having to re-prime the pump to the pump grenading and sending shrapnel into the injectors, ruining them TOO.
Isn't the interaction between the laser toner cartridge and drum completely electrostatic? I thought the toner just gets pulled out of the cartridge via static electricity?
I have an old brother laser printer/ scanner. Unfortunately the driver doesn't work since Windows 10. It doesn't recognize either scanner or printer. Windows 8 was still fine...
Depending on how interested you are in getting it up and going again, Brother in the past has been good at providing Linux drivers. I use a small single-purpose lightweight linux PC as a print server and let it deal with the driver- and then just serve the printer to all computers on my network as a network printer.
If a driver like that is available for your model it could be a way to revive it.