The i3 - as originally desinged by josef prusa.
SHOULD have:
1) dual z axis stepper motors - moves the z-axis evenly both sides
2) 2 support rails for the print bed - Keeps it level and stable
3) direct drive extruder - prints faster and is better for flexible filaments.

What creality did was take that design and throw all three of those design factors out the window.

This m,akes any printer based on the creality design problematic. On a long x gantry, without 2 motors it will NEVER move evenly both sides.
with just a central bed rail - it will almost never be perfectly flat or level.
With an awkardly placed bowden tube extruder you will struggle with flexible filaments and when the hot end is near the extruder you get really sharp angles for the extruder to push filament round.

There simply are NO upsides with messing around with the original design like this.

Now, because the creality design is much cheaper and they don't give a crap how bad the machines are if people on youtube are paid to tell you they work.
Lots of people have jumped on the bandwagon and are also making badly flawed i3's.

So when looking for an i3 those are the three design essentials you should look for.

Of the three, the direct drive extruder and the dual z motors are the most important.
the sovol-01 is a machine with dual z-motors and dd extruder. They also use a fairly wide central rail and that doesn't seem to cause much of aproblem.
https://www.amazon.com/Sovol-Pre-Ass...3694323&sr=8-4

The best starter machine around is probably the prusa mini. Costs more, but is cutting edge.

And this is the problem, people won't pay reasonable money.

The monoprice mini v2 is actually also a good place to start. https://www.amazon.com/Monoprice-Sel...3694695&sr=8-2

I mean get an ender 3 design if you want a baptism by fire - but for machine that might just work well - Almost ANYTHING else :-)

have you though about a delta ?
https://www.amazon.com/FLSUN-Lastest...3694892&sr=8-5