The downside is that the larger door would mean the fridge would lose coldness a lot faster when opening the door. What if we had "chest fridges" like chest freezers, which preserve temperature very efficiently?
Creating a chest fridge from a freezer is actually trivial at least in simple chest freezer units. Just swap out the thermostat for a fridge one and everything works. The freezer thermostats just work on a different temperarure range but they're interchangeable.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.
Losing coldness due to opening door is really not very relevant. Most of the cold in a fridge is stored in the items you keep in the fridge, not in the air itself. A typical fridge holds maybe 1 kg of air inside it, and cooling 1 kg of air by 17 Kelvings is 17 kJ, which is probably a minute of compressor running. Opening a fridge and losing all cold air from it thus costs you probably something like a quarter of a cent.
I learned this when I was about to hack together a chest fridge with a PID controler and the appliance repair shop where I went to get parts gave me the XY problem question. Once I told them what I was doing they just did the thermostat replacement instead in no time.