We lived in the Netherlands for several years and our refrigerator was very small, but I wasn’t working and could shop for fresh vegetables, meat, dairy every other day or so. It had a very small freezer that we used for trays of ice cubes. We bought a chest freezer to supplement that because my husband had quarterly meetings at Ramstein AFB in Germany and could shop there and so we used the freezer to store things we couldn’t find like nicely marbled beef, Italian sausages, I can’t remember but it was the solution for us then.
Now, I have a large refrigerator with a nice pull-out bottom freezer drawer. We have a chest freezer in our basement because we tend to cook large batches of things and plan to put some away for when we don’t want to bother cooking. It’s only 2 of us. But I wouldn’t want a smaller capacity refrigerator because we don’t have easy access now to fresh markets for produce. Once a week DH has been venturing out for groceries and green things are precious. I haven’t left the house in 5 weeks.
