A smart TV is better at being a TV than it otherwise would be

I think that depends on what you want from your TV. If you just want it to have a video input to stream stuff from somewhere else, smart TVs are typically worse because they take more time to boot up.

It’s all about marketing. “This smart fridge uses quantum AI technology to do neural scans of the contents of your fridge, allowing it to adjust the temperature and humidity perfectly for your food, making it crisp and moist!”

Nope. A TV's sole job is to shit photons into my eyes. I have different appliances to tell it which photons those should be.

They could be in theory. But they are designed to bring a lot of terrible interface choices into the mix, so a basic screen where you just pick the input source and delegate the "smart" parts to something you control can end up being more comfortable.

I disagree. The one of the few smart thing i don't want in my house is a smart tv, because it's really just a subpar computer being build into a TV, and higher spec cost too much. I don't want to change a TV every 3 to 5 years because the computer part degraded and make using the TV impossible. I can use my PC for that.

The one smart feature I could see useful on a fridge would be for it to send me some sort of notification if the door is left open. Perhaps it could also send a notification if the temperature inside gets too warm (or too cold) - which assuming the door is shut would probably mean the fridge is broken.

With that said, I'm perfectly happy with a dumb box that gets cold inside and has a simple electro-mechanical switch to turn the light on when the door is opened.

A true smart fridge would be great.

An actual smart fridge would do things like scan everything you put in it, so you'd know that you had leftover lasagne from 4 days ago that was about to go bad. It would know its full contents, and where they were (like that you had some kimchi on the 4th shelf in the back), and when they were going to expire. And it would do it without you having to change how you used the fridge, like stopping to carefully scan everything you put in or took out. AFAIK some smart fridges do some of that, but not all.

And so the lobotomizers cite right-to-repair laws

We've figured out how to do fridges a long time ago, there's really not much to it: a well insulated box, radiators inside and outside, a pump, a metering device, and a thermostat. Sure, all components have been optimized a bit, but the power usage only went down by like half in the past 50 years, it's not as bad as you're describing.

I've never had a fridge with a control board, it's usually just a compressor connected via a two-connection control thingy which prevents it from starting too often, and a relay that's controlled by a thermostat. If they managed to replace that with a control board... Why?