Better Ice Farming

Minecraft is so old now that some worlds are old enough to not have new generation for many thousands of blocks. Farming ice for Nether highways as it currently is is very tedious. Ice should be easier to farm. Maybe with pistons or something, but at this stage, ice should be able to be obtained with a fully automatic setup. Any specific ideas would be helpful because I'm not entirely certain myself. I personally have a world that's been around since 1.18 that has roughly 900 hours on it. (Per-world time tracking and statistics would also be great.) The nearest unexplored chunks are thousands of blocks away, and I intend to play on this world for years to come, which will only make exploration harder and harder. Maybe a freezer block or an ice villager class that sells you snow and ice could be ways to help with this problem. Sell you a bunch of ice for a handful of emeralds, and some blue ice at Master level. Maybe the freezer idea I had would be his workstation. You could interact with the freezer by putting a bucket of water in and getting ice out of it. I really hope this gets added someday because traveling in really old worlds is a huge pain and this would make it so much less of a hassle.