I suspect early servicing has very little effect, although probably impossible to prove. Far more important is the correct spec of oil and checking its level. Probably not driving it too hard from cold is sensible as well. I suspect engines that go on to burn oil are probably due to a weakness somewhere in the design - for example back in the 70s VW Golfs suffered from poor valve guides.

The TU3 engine is bulletproof stone age technology, I ran one to 127K over 15 years & it didn't consume oil.

Used to run mine on 10W40 semi then full synthetic as it was free from work & changed it every 6k miles or so with a genuine filter.

Remember these also have manually adjustable tappets & number 1 cylinder is the gearbox end!

Timing belt replacement is also about as easy as it gets.

Regular fresh oil of a decent grade, regular level checks, other servicing kept up to date, driven with mechanical sympathy, that's not to say necessary slowly but allowing engines to warm up reasonably gently and if turbocharged to allow to cool before shutdown.

I've tried to do this my whole motoring life, and if i owned a car with longer than sensible service intervals always gave that advice a good ignoring.

Result, haven't ever had a car that drank oil to any extent, but i'm wary of modern Diesels in particular that use no oil, how much of that oil is actually fuel from incomplete regens.

My Subaru uses a little but that appears to be a feature of the boxer design, seldom need to actually to top up before the next change is due.

By the way, sorry JohnF :-), almost never have my cars gone past 3000 miles on the same oil.

Trucks i've had use of over 5 decades, if any of them were smokey and/or oil drinkers they were always neglected examples, ie lack of oil changes and previous alleged drivers who allowed the oil to get too low, worse case was a Volvo car transporter in the 90's when i'd recently started there after being made redundant, regular driver on holiday i used his vehicle, had to put 5 gallons of oil in to bring it up to the level, the poor thing smoked like a chimney, 6 months later he's back and the engined seized with no oil in the sump, driver sacked...to be fair the servicing at that cowboy outfit was non existant, all maintenance paperwork was total fiction.

We've had several new posters here who have run their engines repeatedly almost devoid of engine oil, MINI's featured more than once, lazy owners not bothering to check until the oil pressure light came on and then complaining the engine drank oil all the time, well blow me down with a feather guvnor what did you expect...they received little sympathy here but their poor long suffering cars did.

toyota yaris hybrid 2017. self serviced oil change every 10k using toyota 0/20 now 87k never ever had need to top up

All engines burn some oil, they have to otherwise the piston rings would rapidly score the bores resulting in a seizure. It's just that some engines are better at controlling how much oil is allowed past the pistons' oil control rings to lubricate the upper cylinder walls.

Not much oil is needed to maintain a film a couple of microns thick on the upper cylinder walls, which is why on a 'good' engine the oil level seen on the dipstick may not drop, or only drop a couple of mm between changes (I'm excluding valve stem seals / poorly-designed CCV systems as reasons for consumption here).

Keeping the rings and cylinder bores in good shape is a question of mechanical sympathy: running-in the engine well; changing oil & filter regularly; driving sympathetically; having effective air filtration at the inlet etc.