My experience was the opposite. I couldn’t get my babies to eat baby food. They nursed exclusively until they moved to finger food at about 10 months.
Teach me to generalize from personal experience!
I didn’t find that breastfeeding prevented ear infections, in particular. All my kids had them, including the ones that went longest without eating food, until I started cleaning out their ears with Tea Tree Oil. On the other hand, one of my friends has a daughter with Down Syndrome, and she attributes the avoidance of ear infections (endemic in Downs children because of defects in the ear canal) to breastfeeding.
So, in conclusion, nurse the babies as long as humanly possible! It’s free! And I’ve lost the snake. Oh, dear ...
My youngest came out of the womb puking everything up. After she barfed up her first feeding, the nurse and I thought that maybe she had swallowed some amniotic fluid and it upset her stomach. But that was to be her experience for almost a year and a half. I gave up breastfeeding very quickly as I just didn't have the stamina or the desire to double feed her constantly. The first bottle always came up but the second stayed down. It got quite expensive especially since we had to get more expensive kind. Today, at 6yrs old, she won't eat hardly anything.
One thing that I have noticed is that half the neighborhood kids have caps all over their teeth and cavities galore. My kids don't. Although my youngest did get formula, I held her when she was feeding--like you do when nursing. Neither of my kids walked around with bottles hanging from their teeth or fell asleep with them and i'm sure that's helped.