Basically understand that fridges and freezers work by making a surface, heat exchanger or some type of pipe cold. Being cold leads to moisture in ambient air condensing on that. And being usually below freezing to icing on it. Ice is not very good heat conductor. So you want occasionally get rid of it. Easiest way to achieve this is heating it. Simple resistive heaters are cheap and maluable for this.

Now if you can control these heaters you can pump up the temperature to quite high. And I imagine with certain uses cases actually emptying the whole thing heating it up to melt ice and then bringing temp back down is not that unreasonable process. Also allows keeping the temperature in very close range. For home appliances bit more temperature variation is acceptable.

Maybe it could be combined with thermostats? E.g. one for "if it ever gets hotter than N degrees, disconnect all heating elements and trigger some alarm", another one for "if it's warmer than X for longer than Y minutes, do the same". That could also be to the network, too, it just would never read from it, or from anything electronically. Just bimetals closing or opening circuits, basically. How expensive would that even be? (If you planned for it from day 1 of the design I mean, not retrofitting things)