Thanks so much for sharing this. When I was 1yo (in the 1970s), my parents took me to Sears (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears) and had a "computer portrait" generated which looks like what you've done. They were so intrigued by this highly pixelated portrait, they had it on the wall almost 20yrs. It seems so commodity now, but these things were true novelties 40ish years ago.
The why is that you haven't reverse-engineered the printer internals and modified it to give you fine-grained low-level control over the printing process.
Have you looked at the printer's advanced properties dialog? (Assuming these are still a thing?) I haven't owned a printer in years but my last one (some kind of Epson) had options to control the half-toning.