Honestly when it works it works wonderfully. Most of my problems with my ender 3 come down to me being a dumbass and not taking care of it properly, and/or just the nozzles they ship with it being cheap as fuck and impossible to cold pull.
No joke my first ever successful cold pull was 2 days ago, because I had finally gotten a decent set of nozzles.
If you want to get really serious about printing there are better options out there, but for the cost they really are awesome beginner printers (to be fair I haven’t kept up much with printers, so I don’t know many other good cheap ones). I mostly only dabble with printing, but my ender 3 pro that I got like 3 years ago has served me very well.
You may be interested in these links, it can reduce or eliminate the problems which require cold pulls. Basically the issue is that the tubing moves up and down during printing and creates a slack space where the filament gets into a region of the nozzle it’s not supposed to reach. This modification uses a short length of tubing inside the nozzle that is pushed down tight, then your regular tubing sits on top of that where the movement doesn’t cause any problems. I’ve never had a single clogged nozzle or needed to do a cold pull in several years since making this change, so I highly recommend it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tCxO17XZtw https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4220059
