Mac corrupted printer and caused paper jam

Since I updated to Ventura for the past several weeks, my printers (two Epson and Brother Laser) have been giving me massive problems.

Generally, it seems like the Mac is not communicating with the printers properly and not saving the settings. Since this is Christmas, I've been trying to print envelopes using print-merge using several apps, including Pages and Microsoft Word, and several utilities.

The major problem is that print settings like print landscape and portrait are not being saved. Moving to different menus shows different settings. And then, when I get a setting I want, the printer will print using another setting that I did NOT set! I.e., if the software is set to landscape, it will sometimes print portrait. Sometimes.

So that's a software problem? Nope. ALL software I've tried does the same thing. And it's random. Given that the symptoms are the same, the obvious conclusion is that this is an OS problem.

But it gets better... When I tried to print an envelope manually this morning, the printer locked up with an envelope jammed so severely that the envelope would not be removed. After spending an hour on the phone with Epson support, they finally concluded that the printer was defective and are sending me a replacement.

Given the symptoms, my conclusion is the Mac Ventura OS has one or more printing bugs. Has anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions?

Thanks,

Dan.

p.s. Note that my MacBook Pro Max is new as of January 2022, and all software is up to date.