Unsurprising. So much of our "conventional wisdom" is untested. Makes sense that, somewhere along the line, people conflated the loss of flavor from exposing underripe tomatoes to the cold with the idea that the cold itself eliminates flavor. I store my tomatoes when fully ripe in the fridge if I can't eat them in time. They always taste fine as long as I don't eat them cold straight out of the fridge.

I agree with Gor. Cold can/will slows down ripening process. But maybe it won't make a difference if the tomato is already fully ripe.

There is another factor. Frig is very low humidity and fruits can loose moisture much faster. For example I have seen limes to get rock hard in the frig.

Sey

Cold dampens our ability to perceive aromatic compounds, and our taste buds don't work as well when they're cold. So, basically, everything has less flavor when it's colder. Tomatoes are not unique in this regard. But bringing food up to a warmer temperature generally fixes the issue.

Check out this link.

Why tomatoes lose flavor in fridge: their genes chill out

And if the link doesn't work, go here.

http://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2016-10-17/why-tomatoes-lose-flavor-in-fridge-their-genes-chill-out

Yes, but that article still only really accounts for the hindered formation of those compounds. Once a fruit is at ideal ripeness, the ideal amount of those compounds has already been formed. If anything, refrigeration may help slow the degradation of those compounds. It may even be good if implemented on fruit at the peak of ripeness because it may slow overripening, which produces off flavors. It's the same issue: confusing cold as a detriment to ripening with cold's effect on already ripened fruit. A mechanism that blocks synthesis of compounds doesn't necessarily affect compounds already synthesized.

According to the abstract of the paper itself (I always go to the original paper, as science "journalism" is uniformly awful in our society), the study was about post-harvest chilling of commercial tomatoes, i.e., tomatoes not fully ripe.

Not sure whether the press release was bad/vague or whether the scientists are deliberately pushing their conclusions past their actual findings in order to glam up their findings by trying to make their findings relative to the average Joe's and Jane's life, since commercial tomato post-harvest handing isn't really anything most of us can do anything about or participate in. I refuse to pay the industry's exorbitant prices for access to research materials behind firewalls, but I would bet good money that the conclusions of the actual paper are far more conservative and have nothing to do with refrigerating fully ripened home-grown tomatoes.