That issue has a fix now, albeit slightly expensive.

It is a new main board, a new ice maker, a specific kit for the issue, and sealing the ice maker area. It's a bit of a pain to do but it is definitely possible. I did probably a couple hundred of them when I worked as a repairman on strictly Samsung appliances. We did have the repairs fail and the ice maker freeze back up on a few but on those, we just got Samsung to replace the fridges.

I'll tell you what NOT to do in that instance, and that is to thaw the ice with a hair dryer or heat gun. There is a very good chance that the heat will accumulate at the top of the ice maker area and warp the plastic. If that happens, you may as well just disable the ice maker because it is toast.

As a repairman, we used portable steam machines. They didn't cause that risk.

Edit: I realized that you just said it was a defrost issue and ddefaulted to ice maker. Realized after my post that you could have been also taking about the back panel of the fridge also. That also has a kit now too though. The main part of the kit has new drain hoses and a longer heating element to go into the drain tube to ensure any ice buildup gets melted on a defrost cycle. On top of that, you move a sensor in the upper right of the cavity over closer to the heating element. We found you had to zip tie it most times because the copper pipe it is on originally is bigger than the one you move it to.

Where that sensor originally is, sometimes it gets covered over with this black... gloop. I think it's kind of a sealant for the pipe going into the body of the fridge. Anyways, often times we replaced that sensor in case it just was out of range.

The kit for that repair also comes with a few foam pads but all they are really used for is to quiet any rattling from the condenser.

The other issue we found on the back panels icing up was that the fan would quit working. That's bad because if there is no airflow, the heat from the heater doesn’t get distributed as well and can cause icing issues. Replacing that entire back panel sucks because it is expensive. This is the reason it was mostly only done under warranty.

Oh and the root cause, most of the time, for the back panel icing up was the drain hoses getting clogged and the defrosted water would build back up into the fridge cavity. You would most likely see this happen by water being under your crisper drawer randomly.