And I don't use a 1960 fridge, mines about 3 years old - why? because the old one broke and I had to get a new one quick (I could not afford the time to repair - plus the old one was post-2000 junk anyhow), I like auto-defrost, and the other monkeys that live in the house need ice+water in the door, or they'll throw poop at me.
At a 4% interest rate, and .12$/KWh, a modern fridge @450KWh/yr for 10 years costs NPV -$933 for electricity and say -$1000 to buy it. And old fridge @1800KWh/yr for 10 (more) years costs -$1750. So you'd save about $200 with the ancient fridge, not counting having to manually defrost it.
And before you say it - there is no "repairing over and over". You need to put about that $200 into like it every 20-30 years, every other generation you hand it down to.
Still if electricity doubled in cost, or you just like auto-defrost, or live with other monkeys, it's probably not worth it. But the difference isn't "vast". It's pretty negligible because on the whole, fridges don't use a lot lot of power.
So - why can't we have a basic $1000 modern efficient fridge that is repairable? because - you'd keep it for 30-50 years and that'd be the end of that business. But what if that company was then encouraged to make a better fridge next year. It's an interesting unintended side-effect of right-to-repair and other repair-ability measures. Instead of buying a new fridge because I have to, I should buy a new one because it's 2x as efficient and it's a better value proposition when faced with rising power costs. It'd spawn the right kind of obsolescence not fake bad design obsolescence.