Cutting the cold crank power requirement to 0 is also pretty nice. It means ACs with this thing would play nicely with solar/battery systems as they wouldn't require big current spikes to start.

Yes, it’s mentioned that that can peak at five times the running load to get it started.

Even more. My simple 100W fridge shows peaks up to 3000W when it switches on. Very short but sometimes my Shelly EM catches them (and messes up my graphs :) ). I can also see the lights dim a bit when that happens.

Even if it works I'm not going to buy a new fridge just for that though. Manufacturing a whole new fridge will be worse for the environment than running this for many years especially on green power.

However when it does go, it would be nice to have.