Thank you for sharing that experience. It certainly meshes with my suspicions. I'm actually currently experiencing almost the same phenomenon in my house. My refrigerator was here when I moved in five years ago. It has a service sticker on it from 1997! I don't know exactly when this model left the factory, but if it's "only" 28 years old that would mean that things have gotten worse even since the 90s.

The only issue the fridge has had is that one of the defroster heater coils died (it has two- I guess because it's a side-by-side style, so the freezer part is tall). It wasn't very hard to replace. In fact, the hardest part was actually finding the part, itself.