As a former Toyota master tech I will say the older 90's 3.0 V6 was garbage. Some lasted, most did not. Constant head gasket issues, terrible exhaust manifold design...lots of issues and totally underpowered. I replaced a lot of cylinder heads that were cracked. Hundreds and hundreds of head gaskets before the recall. By the time the recall happened they had revised the head gasket design 7 times. #1 and #6 pistons had to be replaced a lot when the head would go. We had an on the block boring machine to slightly overbore those cylinders during the recall. Way to go Toyota.
First gen Tacoma's had their issues including weak frames at the coil buckets (2WD). We replaced the frames on a couple of trucks and I don't know how many reinforcement plates we welded in for the recall. The 3.4 was a good engine, but they had a head gasket issue early on, but that was resolved pretty quickly. The later 3.5 seemed to be somewhat based on that engine but I don't know for sure. I was out of the auto repair side of things when the later models came out. They seemed to be pretty reliable with some slight improvements made after 2017. The 4 cylinder was legit and came from the Previa vans which seemed to last forever being mounted turned 90 degrees. The only issue was if you ran shit gas carbon would build on the top of the piston and cause the engine to knock like it had a bad bearing. It was carbon actually contacting the chamber in the head. A little GM topside engine cleaner solved that problem.
From my experience with Toyota never buy the first year of a new model. There will always be issues and Toyota is good about making corrections and running changes later. I would say wait a year or two before getting the new generation. That allows Toyota time to make needed changes. I will give them credit. When there is a known issue they work quickly to improve the part or design causing the failure.
Also get rid of the pink coolant they come with when new. Flush the system out and go to normal old school green coolant. Myself as well as all of the other techs at the dealers I worked with were convinced the pink coolant caused more harm than good. We sure seemed to see more coolant leaks and head gasket problems with that stuff than the regular green coolant. A lot of deposits, the scaly looking stuff would build up in places you don't want it. One of my friends that was a tech did that on a new truck. Ditched the stock manifolds on the 3.0 V6 and went to a short header to get rid of the cross over pipe behind the heads. He never had a head gasket issue. The last time I talked to him he was at 235k and no failure yet. We never had seen one go more than 80-100k without failure.