It's not about "back trouble". Digging through a chest freezer regularly is a pain even if your back is in great shape.
Most of the stuff people use frequently ends up on the top shelves or in the doors of fridges. Lots of fridges have really deep door shelves to maximize this utility. Similarly, nicer fridge/freezer combos have mostly moved the freezer to the bottom to increase the convenience of the fridge.
Most fridges also have quite a few shelves so that you can get out the thing you want without moving everything. In a chest freezer, the baskets don't hold most of the food. Most of it is stacked on the bottom. So to get the thing you want, you inevitably have to move other things off of it. Refrigerators minimize this hassle.
Plus the condensation is gross and extremely inconvenient to clean when the fridge is full. I can't imagine leaving the walls of my fridge wet for 2-3 months at a time. You can address that with a chest fridge that operates like a normal fridge (cooling and therefore dehumidifying the air directly), but I bet you lose most of the efficiency gains as soon as you do.