From my experience in a restaurant, those large commercial rooftop refrigeration/freezer units need attention several times a year. It's rare that your home fridge would have trouble that often but commercial units are more complicated and in a harsher environment. And supermarket installations are probably even more complicated.

Routine service and maintenance doesn't require net connectivity to schedule.

Agreed. I was just addressing that it's not exceedingly rare to need to get a tech out on site to address something. Should the manager be on top of this, checking temps on all the cases every day? Absolutely, but I can see the argument for a more automated system of monitors/alarms that can get a tech dispatched before the manager has even noticed the problem.

Not all issues are routine.

So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.

I'm pretty confident there is no failure mode industrial cooling equipment can experience that can be solved remotely. Remote monitoring and control systems on the other hand...

Sure there is.

Suppose the condition is that temperature in the freezers is rising, producing active concern for the contents.

A smart person with the right access can see that, and also correlate it with other things.

Like:

The doors to the building are open, while the HVAC takes a break because the weather is temperate and isn't dehumidifying as it would be on a hot day?

And it's a holiday food-buying week, so the freezers' doors are open for buying and restocking more than usual?

If the refrigerant pressures and other stats also fit the scenario, then: The evap coils may just be iced up. If they can be defrosted from the comfort of your desk a thousand miles away, then that's pretty great. Just like what was done (to malicious extreme) here.

(You're a smart person. You could correlate these things yourself if this were your trade, save a trip [or many, many trips across a chain], and get paid to make these kinds of things happen remotely.)

"A smart person with the right access can see that", so like a store employee glancing at your choice of an analog temperature display or a telltale light? A perfectly workable solution that persists for the vast majority of the restaurant industry and every independent grocery store in the country, and has done for roughly the last century. Adding the kind of aggressively stupid failure modes that software drags into the discussion (eg. russian bot networks are attacking the ice cream) to avoid having to occasionally inspect equipment doesn't seem particularly bright.

These systems only exist because those economics were decided decades ago. Issues are not exceptions in systems like this. They are huge, complex, and interface with the public.

The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.

Marketing. The restaurant industry doesn't have less skin in the game than grocery retailers re avoiding spoilage and net connected walk-in coolers and freezers are not a thing.