- Every time you pull out the bin, you get a reminder about what you have, and what is going bad
- A meal is fairly easily structured by drawing one or more times from each bin
- It's much easier to clean a bin than to clean the whole fridge; you can move the contents into a new bin and clean the old one
- Food stays fresher because it's in airtight containers, and not subject to the horrid dry air of the fridge
- I know roughly how many person-days of food are in a bin —— so I can plan when to go to the store
- It's really easy to know what kind of food to buy more of when you go to the store —— bin closest to empty.
The one gotcha is that some bins can't be out of the fridge for long (e.g. meat), but generally the bins have sufficient thermal mass that 3-5 minutes on the counter inspection and choosing a few ingredients isn't going to cause any spoilage.
And you get that already for the cheap units.
So, it's a freezer, it freezes, and it doesn't send a post to Facebook. The only complaint I would have is their loudness. Modern extra-slow compressors are often (perceived) louder than previous-gen units.
Also: given that even DIY ovens usually start with "get a cheap PID controller from e-bay", I doubt that commercial ones use anything else.
That said, very few refrigerators out of the large number of available models (many more than say dishwashers or clothes washer/dryers) have the same interior layout.
Even two nearby models from the same manufacturer with minor feature differences will have significantly different layouts, to the point that you can't just choose to get a fridge with or without feature X without also choosing between differences in the likely more important aspect of layout.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, YES!
If I were one to build appliances, I would probably start by pumping liquid refrigerant through thermally-conductive shelves, and dispense entirely with blowing the cold air around. Air has almost no thermal mass. Water with a bit of ammonia dissolved in it is probably what is circulating through aluminum tubes.
Put the food to be chilled directly on the cold shelf, and the heat is removed by conduction, rather than convection.
Once we have that squared away, separate the portion of the appliance responsible for removing the heat from the portion responsible for storing the food. Stop selling the ugly awkward insulated cabinet attached the refrigerator. Now you have your standard back end, which does nothing but circulate fluid at a specific temperature through external hoses, and a customizable variety of front ends with standardized refrigeration hose fittings.
I'd want my insulated food storage cabinets to have evacuated double-paned glass windows in them, proximity-activated fluorescent tube lights, be relatively shallow for fridge shelves, and have pegboards on the back wall. I hate having to move front-food around to get to the back-food. It should all be front-food, which means shelves that are wide and not deep. One cannot do this with a monolithic appliance. One can easily do this with modular parts.
The deepest foods I ever want to store are large pizza boxes. Even those don't fill up the entire depth of a typical fridge.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.
or perhaps a software solution can help. Your fridge could recommend you eat certain things which are about to go mouldy.