Here's my tentative conclusion on this sad story.

The culprit is a poor design of the fridge, such that

1) It cannot restart with the compressor hot
and
2) It does not wait until the compressor gets cold.

The above could have been corrected with $5 worth of parts and a LED
light.

In addition, the manual is silent about this issue.

Very possibly, the refrigerator was fine all along, and just needed to
rest for an hour before a restart. I cannot positively confirm that
without reusing old parts, one of which I busted during repair, but
this is my feeling.

In any case, I replaced parts, ran it for two minutes, and it would
not restart again 5 minutes later. After waiting for a while, it
restarted just fine.

I consider this to be my education and $34 for parts was a fee.

I will tell people at home about this unplugging technique.

i