The sweet spot has always been a 1 year old used car with low miles. There’s lots of those for less than or about $25k. Honda, Toyota, and Mazda have models in those ranges that will easily last a decade.
If you don’t drive much yourself, “low miles” after a couple years doesn’t matter quite as much. e.g. I bought my car at a couple years old with 40k miles already, but in the following twelve years I’ve only run it up to about 115k miles, so I’ve turned it from a “high-mileage two-year-old car” into a “low-mileage 14-year-old car”.