you could reflash your fridge
Well yes, but honestly that’s swimming upstream. I always discourage reverse engineering or hacking unless you do it for learning and entertainment purposes. If you love the challenge it’s amazing. If you want to use the tool they you are giving away money to corporations you do not trust and you put a lot of weight on your shoulders to maintain all that over time.
Actually (put on fedora) a “smart” fridge is not necessarily bad.
No what absolutely sucks is lock-in and enshittification.
If you were to imagine a FLOSS OSHW fridge that used e.g. OpenFoodFacts and data from your purchases, e.g. OCRing your grocery list receipt or online purchases and genuinely helped with stock, recipes, diet, etc why not.
The WHOLE point is control, it’s not the technology.
That’s why picking the right tech matters. My heuristic is that if you need a proprietary app, it’s NOT going to be on your term, hard pass.
If you do need some connectivity, it’s also probably bad.
If you do not need connectivity and it’s interoperable via standards then and only then maybe it can be good.