Interesting. I had a Brother duplex wi-fi laser printer die on me last year. It was about 10 years old but had led a very sheltered life - only on its 2nd or 3rd toner.
Didn’t seem to be anything mechanically wrong with it, but one day it just stopped printing or receiving commands properly. Still booted up ok and menus were responsive, but would freeze up on any attempt to print, even a test page. Sad day, but I’ve learned to live without a printer now.
Nothing surprising IMO as it's about 10 years old. Since you did not use it much, I would say the mechanical structures would be still very sound but it's the electronics were the culprits. If you kept it turned on, current would have aged the components and if any of the critical ones failed, it's done. But it might have failed even sooner if you rarely turned it on as moisture accumulated in the components and when it should get to some threshold, it got busted as soon as it turned on.
We have used lots of Brother printers at work. All of them worked just fine except one that we exchanged before the 2 year warranty ran out. They are rated at a certain number of pages per drum and that has kept pretty well so far, after two drum changes the paper jams starts to get higher and after a while they will be pensioned. My much older one has outlived them all though. At work we don't use printers the same way any more so not much need for them thankfully.
Didn’t seem to be anything mechanically wrong with it, but one day it just stopped printing or receiving commands properly. Still booted up ok and menus were responsive, but would freeze up on any attempt to print, even a test page. Sad day, but I’ve learned to live without a printer now.