Yeah. That description you quoted is close, but has an important factual error:

The reason that speaker cabinets aren't needed on Geddy's side of the stage has nothing to do with monitoring. It's simpler than that. He just goes DI (direct-in) with his bass (always has, at least in recent years) and there isn't any need for a stack of bass amps on his side of the stage like Alex's guitar amps on Alex's side of the stage. So something had to go in that spot to make the stage look symmetrical.

But yeah, they've been doing the "appliances on stage" gag for the last several tours. As I recall, it started with a single refrigerator, which got restocked with water bottles during the show by roadies. Then they had dryers where the gag was that roadies would have to come out between songs and put quarters into the dryers to keep them going. The T-shirts in the dryers would get thrown out to the audience at the end of the show, with specific messages on each one indicating which dryer they came out of.

The rotisserie chicken thing was started up on the first leg of this most recent tour, meant as simply a continued escalation of the running gag. I thought it was hilarious especially with the intro movie with Ged doing his Scotsman impression.