Idle speculation:
I wonder how much of that positioning stems from the fact that most desktop inkjet printers didn't get very many prints per cartridge, especially back in the days when colored inks were all together in a single cartridge.
My family had an HP DeskJet 892c or something like that and I seem to recall getting maybe 200 pages of black text per cartridge before it was time to buy new ink, versus about 3-4,000 or so for a PLW320 or 4/600PS and 10,000 or so for an LWP600-630 or 16/600PS (later up to 15,000 if you used Xerox's LJ4 carts instead of one from Apple or HP.)
"Continuous Ink Supply System" is a relatively modern thing in inkjet now in modern times with CISS you can make a fairly solid case for putting an inkjet on the network. Before then though, in the mid-2000s (~2005-07 or so depending) color lasers got cheap and small workgroup color lasers were probably the best way to do a shared color printing.
(CISS is also the first time you can get an inkjet printer to have a lower cost per page than a laser printer, but CISS working well relies fairly explicitly on a somewhat high print volume to keep print paths clean/clear, whereas lasers can sit idle for years and jump back into action with no fuss.)
Color LaserJets/LaserWriters existed in the '90s but in terms of dollars I bet the crossover from "individual or very small group shared stylewriters" to "buying a Color LaserJet" was very high. (a super quick search makes it look like Color LaserWriter 12/600PS, which was the 1996 price drop model, was about $5,900, which is lower than I thought it was, but it also weighs over a hundred pounds and can draw over a kilowatt so there's some Operational Concerns as well.)