Thirteen years doesn't strike me as particularly bad. Not great, but not bad. That 80-year-old fridge the repair shop guy is bragging about is almost certainly not an auto defrost unit. So, sure, it's probably close to a modern fridge in power consumption but the tradeoff is you'll have to scrape ice out of it periodically.
https://hbr.org/1989/03/cold-competition-ge-wages-the-refrig...
Edit:
Pretty early on I got a couple wireless temperature probes and used rtl-sdr to pipe the data into a TimescaleDB instance (and slapped Grafana in front of it).
I have no idea what the actual problem was because LG was keen on a refund over a repair. The symptoms were failure to cool and ice buildup on the evaporator getting into the fan and making a racket. The tech diagnosed a bad thermistor which brought the freezer temp during defrost down from 50°F to about 30–40°F. Even though the tech took a steam gun to the evaporator, it took about two weeks before enough ice built up and fell into the fan again. At this point the fridge wasn't getting below 40°F either and my landlord decided to take them up on the refund offer.
Could've been a bad compressor as one of the failure modes is inability to pump refrigerant. The compressor itself sounded like a ringing bell. I stopped caring because nobody at LG cares and they are not positioned to actually service their appliances. It's likely a design flaw they either already know about or don't want to know about. Getting through to a person empowered to do anything is nearly impossible and their techs have a miserable time trying to get parts from their poorly run warehouses. I'm a bit apprehensive that other companies have joined the race to the bottom, but for now LG is solidly in never again territory for me.