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I'm going to take these out of order.
If you have a continuous and frequent need or strong desire for small plastic objects. If you have a hobby like cosplaying, cosplayers find 3D printers quite useful for making costume parts or props, tabletop players like printing minifigures or playsets, if you're an electronics hobbyist it can be useful to print cases and enclosures for projects, if you're a woodworker you'll never stop needing jigs, brackets, vacuum hose adapters.
Or, if you're interested in 3D printing itself. There are folks doing like, 4-axis non-planar stuff that's industry leading, for the fun of it. Hell and gone smarter than I am.
If you have one project in mind, or "might occasionally find a use for it," hire it done rather than buying a machine.
There's kind of a trap for newbies to 3D printing: Inexpensive printers tend to be projects unto themselves. Which can be a good thing if you're interested in the hobby of 3D printing itself. If you want to buy a machine, plug it in and it just works, expect to spend $1000. Because you're either going to buy a Prusa, which start at about $1000 for an assembled MK4S, or a Bambu Labs machine for about $500 and then they'll getcha somehow. Bambu Labs sketches the fuck out of me, they're trying to be the HP of FDM.
Even then, if you have one of the "just works" machines, you still have things to learn. What plastic to choose for this model that needs to be outdoors? Do you use a textured or smooth sheet for PETG? Can you print ASA without a heated enclosure? Should you use glue stick for TPU? Can you print PC-CF with a brass nozzle? What do the eight pages of print settings in the slicer do? If you can envision the printer sitting turned off for months at a time, does all that seem worth learning?
Mainly, have something you need to 3D print for.
I have found that Thingiverse and Printables are both full of idiots. They let literally anyone on there, and I've found the dumbest shit.
"It's 7% shorter in the X axis because my printer prints 7% long in that direction so I squish all my parts to compensate. And then I upload them like that because my mom let me eat paint chips as a baby" has to be my favorite, right after "This design relies heavily on trapping hex nuts in hexagonal recesses, and I looked up the "diameter" of M3 nuts and modeled that as the across flats dimension because my mom is my dad's mom!"
If you want to print anything other than flexible dragons and Bender Bhuddas, and then actually use them, you're going to need to know how to alter things other people ruined through incompetence, or design things from scratch. The ability to design the thing YOU need is what really unlocks the power of a 3D printer.