What we’ve found, in our current house and the previous one, is that the cabinet over the fridge is just about the least useful one in the kitchen. We need a step stool to get to this one and in the old house, where the fridge was deeper than our new one here, even with the step stool it was hard to get to the back of the top shelf.
So a few weeks ago, when we were considering the same options @Aspenglow is pondering, we also thought of simply removing the cabinet. But it was built into the wall, not merely hung, as modern cabinets are, so taking it down would leave some ugliness that would take some additional carpentry anyway. We may completely redo the kitchen at some point, but we didn’t want to live with the messiness for the indefinite future. Hence our decision to modify rather than remove.