Agree that as toner cartridges get low they streak.
The “fix” is to remove the cartridge from the printer, bang it gently on the desk a time or two, then shake it with first one end then the other downwards. That breaks up any clumps and redistributes the toner more evenly and should alleviate the streaks. For awhile. You can lather rinse repeat this for easily a couple hundred more pages.
Definitely as the toner gets low, it becomes smart to not try to print a 200 page job at one go. Lest you get, as you say, 120 good pages, 30 marginal pages, and 50 ruined sheets of paper.
My use case is 5 pages per job max, with 75% being one or two pages. I can stretch a dying cartridge until I can hear Jack Benny applauding. You can too if you’re willing to print subsets of the whole doc as the cartridge gets near the end of life.