If you want to print miniatures that are actually miniature in scale, a resin printer is probably the way to go. That said, you need to wash prints, cure prints, properly dispose of waste materials, etc. This article talks about their differences and shows somr a/b comparisons halfway through it. You can get pretty good detail with a small nozzle on a FDM printer, but resin will still blow it away.
As for a budget printer, most are generally pretty reliable but if you want good results you're probably going to need to fiddle with them. You'll also probably need to fiddle with them to keep them running and/or optimized (for example, better fan shrounds for your hot end, etc). I didn't mind somewhat ugly prints from my i3 Plus, so I didn't need to do very much fiddling beyond some basic mods over the 5 or so years I was fairly actively using it - especially after I replaced the bed springs with silicone and printed snug fitting thumb wheels.
There's nothing wrong with an "old" printer. I bought a Monoprice branded Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus a little over 7 years ato and from a pure feature perspective it's not that different than the base Ender v3. The biggest advances are in quality of life things, like z-offset calibration and "auto leveling", but it's worth saying that most budget printers can't adjust their extruder mechanically to be in plane with the build plate like say a Voron, so they compensate by tweaking z-height as the extruder moves between high and low spots. Geared reduced extruders on direct drive setups are also preferable over driving the extruder directly from a stepper motor like my old i3 Plus or early Ender v3 models.
Printers are generally very modifiable, so if some new whiz-bang feature comes out in a few years you'll likely be e able to adopt it to your printer.