None of this will work against a normal consumer device, since you cannot flash recovery until you do "fastboot oem unlock", which purposefully erases ALL user data. And most consumers do not walk around with unlocked bootloaders.
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Actually the authors dutifully note this case, explaining that "we show that cold boot attacks are more generic and allow to retrieve sensitive information, such as contact lists, visited web sites, and photos, directly from RAM, even though the bootloader is locked."
Pretty unlikely. A large chunk of that data is not likely in ram, and uploading an image to fastboot will erase a lot of ram as well. You'll get some things maybe. But this isn't nearly the end of the world scenario the article seems to paint.
And also on more recent Android devices you cannot even perform an unlock of the bootoader without knowing the device PIN. Try it on a nexus 5x/6p/9.
From their paper:
> Once the smartphone is up again, the risk of loosing RAM contents is defeated. Flashing the recovery image does not destroy important RAM lines according to our tests.