>I wish commenters (in general) would do a bit more "steelmanning" before asking questions about why something is (in this case) connected to the internet.

People won't steelman because the answer to "why are the fridges slapdashedly networked?" is too often "because people of my ideological bent and demographics if not literally me previously demanded paper trails, audit-ability and regulatory compliance that was impossible for a low margin industry to pull off any other way."