Read only monitoring is fine. “Write” ability must be heavily permissioned, audited, and governed. Failing that, no physical “write” access.
a) Would you send a lineman out to the recloser and have them manually configure it, spending probably hours doing so?
b) Or would you have some operator press a button in a piece of software to engage the recloser (thus, ultimately, writing whatever register in the device to perform the closing)?
Now multiply that scenario to the potentially hundreds/thousands of reclosers in the field.
Companies are going to choose b) every time.
If you want to interrogate recloser behavior remotely (real time and for historical logging), entirely reasonable. If you want to reclose manually or update trip and reclose thresholds, your commands or setting updates must be authenticated, logged, and cryptographically signed. If the ACR encounters lockout, you roll a truck (which you're probably going to do regardless, as lockout indicates a non-transient fault).
they don’t really have write access, but they kinda do?
An Internet rando should not have the ability to disconnect your 700kva interconnect over the public internet. If you breach Tesla and can command enough vehicles to charge in a constrained area to overload local distributed infrastructure, failsafes should kick in and physically segregate loads from the local grid.
Disclaimer: This is only my opinion as an infosec practitioner having done some infosec/GRC consulting for investor owed and coop utilities for FERC compliance.