I think these types of rice cookers are so expensive as they use induction. Honestly I don’t know how much better it is but supposingly it allows for more accurate heating, allowing for more accurate cooking
I would imagine the reliability would be higher. A resistive heating element could degrade and eventually develop a fault, but an inductive circuit decouples the electrical circuit from the heating element. A fault or an impurity in the heating material wouldn’t prevent the inductive field from exciting the surrounding conductor particles.