Have you ever had to manage any of these things or are you just guessing?

When, say, your internet craps out, would you rather your ISP try to resolve the problem, or schedule to send a tech out to your home before they start working on fixing the issue?

Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.

And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.

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Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.

They were paying competent local staff pre-internet.

Lots of things worked pre-internet that now rely on internet in ways that would be rather chaotic and messy to undo.

You're going to have to convince VC and PE to give up the massive profits they're raking in.

Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.

I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.

And when it happens at 3 in the morning? And when those people are in a meeting 10 miles down the road?

Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.

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.

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.