While that’s what people I’ve seen tend to do for convenience — using chest freezers in out of the way places because they already have a combination fridge/freezer in their kitchen, in terms of energy cost of opening the door, it’s the other way around. Opening a chest freezer doesn’t cause as much loss of cold air as a side-opening freezer. The heavier cold air doesn’t spill out the side.

kagis

https://www.sustainability.ucsb.edu/blog/just-facts-labrats/chest-vs-upright-freezers-which-more-efficient-lab

The way that these freezers open also impacts their energy usage. When the door is opened in an upright freezer, large sums of cold air are let out and heat is let in which draws more energy to re-cool the system. Whereas with a chest freezer, there is less cold air loss when the door is opened, the larger depth of the freezer also helps reduce cold air loss, resulting in less energy being needed to restabilize the cold temperature in the freezer.

If you have room for it in a kitchen, it’d be totally reasonable to use a chest freezer for day-to-day use. I wouldn’t have space for one, myself.

EDIT: To extend the analogy, the upright freezer is more like a small internal solid state drive on a SATA bus that came in a desktop from the OEM — you probably already have one, but it has limited capacity and there is a higher access cost — and the chest freezer is like NVMe.