You're right that several problems are worse in the chest fridge. Squishing and cleaning are real differences. The shelving in the door is very useful... but it's useful because the door is shallow. A one-item-deep door can't block access to the rear layers of stuff that it doesn't contain.

A deep vertical refrigerator already completely obscures most of its contents, requires you to move items in order to get what you want, and contains drawers where the contents are not only stacked but completely invisible until you specifically open the drawer to search inside.

Your reference to moving items in the fridge from one shelf to another shelf (temporarily) in order to clean up a spill tells me that you're not engaging in typical deep refrigerator use. The other shelf is already full; to clean up a spill, you need to pull the things that were in the dirty area out of the fridge.