Is it normal for large refrigerators to fail that early?

That grinding noise followed by a dead ice maker is a really common failure pattern on those units. usally it's the ice maker assembly itself, not your controls. The gear train inside strips out or the little drive motor seizes up, and before it dies completely it makes exactly that grinding sound for a week or two. A reset won't do anything once the motor's gone. First thing I'd do is pull the ice maker out and check for a big frozen clump jamming the ejector fingers, because sometimes the grinding is just ice jamming the mechanism and the unit gives up after fighting it. If everythign looks clean and free, the assembly is done. On most of thier fridges the whole ice maker comes out with a few screws and one harness plug, so it's genuinely a DIY swap if you can find the part. And that's the real problem. Call a local independent appliance parts store with your model number before you give up. Samsung's own parts line will tell you all kinds of things that aren't true, but the third party distributors often still have the assembly in stock or can cross reference a compatible one. There are also aftermarket upgrade kits for a bunch of their fridge models that replace the original design with a revised version, which exists partly because the originals failed so often. I helped a neighbor with almost this exact situation last year. Four year old fridge, loud grinding, then nothing. The factory part was listed as backordered with no date. We found the revised assembly through a parts distributor for a fraction of a new fridge and it's been running fine since. So don't take the manufacturer's word that it's scrap. Worst case, an independent repair tech in your area will know which version fits and where to get it, and their markup is usually alot smaller than a whole new appliance.

Same story here with my freezer drawer unit, except mine was the evaporator fan bearing going out around the three year mark. What saved me was pulling the model number off the sticker inside the fridge door jamb and searching that plus 'parts' instead of going through the manufacturer at all. Found the exact fan motor shipped to my door for way less than any service call would've cost, and the swap took maybe 20 minutes with a screwdriver. Also learned the hard way to take a phone video before disassembling anything so I knew where the wire clips went back. The whole thing soured me on buying their stuff again, but at least the fix was cheap once I stopped dealing with their support line.

Mine wasn't the assembly at all, the fill tube had frozen over so the tray never got water and the motor just kept cycling till it cooked itself. A hair dryer and about twenty minutes of patience melted the blockage out, and once I let it thaw fully it started making ice again like nothing happened. That was two winters ago and it's still going. So before you order anything, thaw that line out completely and give it a day to see if it recovers.