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Yeah, this sounds terrible. I wonder how hard it is to run Tailscale on a freezer. Surely the licensing costs for a freezer tailnet are miniscule compared to the reputational damage they have suffered.
A lot of this hardware predates tailscale, and pre-2016 VPNs were... very frustrating to manage even on normal desktop or laptop computers: you at least could run IPSec so the protocol situation wasn't awful, but the server management was either OpenVPN's too-techy-for-some-techs world, or expensive per-user licensed stuff, or untrustworthy stuff like Hamachi.
As for how difficult it would be to fix today... depends a lot on the hardware implementation. A pure MCU-driven approach would be cleaner, less expensive, and more stable, but also much harder to write a VPN or VPN-like capability into, just because of limited RAM and multithreading. An ESP32 can (and many people do) run it, but it's something you need to build into the system early and limits what else you can do. And 2010-era microprocessors would be really hard-pressed to run the stuff Danfoss's guides show, anyway.
It looks like they were on (Linux-based?) conventional embedded computers, at which point adding tailscale is mostly a matter of sysadmin work (and, uh, depending on how old the distro fork/variant, a lot of swearing about compile time and troubleshooting dependencies).
I mean, if this freezer can run an HTTP server with a control panel, it can certainly run Tailscale. I agree that older VPNs were terrible, I remember arranging them between us and our more paranoid customers (not the most paranoid ones, which demanded we keep maintaining our homebrew dial-up client) was a royal pain in the ass. Even bare Wireguard sucks.
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