It is hard to wrap your head around a freezer reaching EOL due to no longer providing firmware updates though. I can absolutely understand why you'd have a hard time convincing a manager that you need to spend money to replace a "perfectly good" freezer just because the vendor no longer provides firmware security updates.

I agree that it's a manager failure in part, but I also think it's a failure on part of the industry to not demand longer term support for this type of product, and also on part of regulators for not realizing the vulnerability of the situation (though the EU Cyber Resilience Act seems an acceptable first stab at remedying this).