Patents. Its always patents.

There is probably some IP there that can make printers worse for consumers too.

The modern interpretation, sure.

And agreed, “random, you might like this” is not as random as “here is a page on red food colouring”

That’s why I said seeded. Seeded from noise. The random number generator (function) is still an algorithm…

In comsci, there are no real random numbers. They are all seeded psuedo-random number algorithms. (Unless you integrate with some third party random as a service setup)