Technology

The fridge itself only activates the compressor when it determines it needs it (typically based on a termostat and the temperature you chose for it) so in a digital fridge that would part of its software since the "desired temperature" setting is itself from some kind of digital input rather than a hardware knob, and in a "Smart" Fridge it makes sense that value can also come from the outside (likely a smart phone app).

I mean, setting the desired temperature ss a stupid near-zero-value feature (how often are you away from the fridge and actually need to change that setting), but designers of smart shit throw all kinds of meaningless crap into it in order to justify the higher price for "smarts" - feature-wise those things are a mile wide and an inch deep.

So it makes sense that a firmware update for the fridge would include the whole code, including the part that just decides when to activate the compressor and hence that even such basic functionality can be hit by a such a bug, even if only indirectly - in a properly managed code base, it's perfectly possibly that the code that activates the compressor itself based on the temperature setting is stable as fuck and never gets updated but the code upstream that sets the target temp from commands sent from a smartphone has been changed and is setting a stupid value, whilst if the thing is vibe coded all bets are off and even the most stable "there have been no feature changes here in 2 decades" areas of the code which only an idiot would touch can very well be changed by the code generator and now have bugs.