mine has worked for years, and it went through 2 refills without issue. even if it did, cleaning a sponge sounds like easy maintenance.
That one is a hard limit. Changing does not clear the error. Tho people have hacked around it if I remember correctly.
there is a way to clean the sponge and reset the counter with 3rd party software. epson could have just put a menu option to reset that into the printer. but they might have already solved that problem. my printer is way newer than the ones i saw articles and videos about.
10$ every 18.000 pages sounds like a good deal though.
https://youtu.be/sDsdLoaMX-w?si=KyoMarW-1rwYZURY