> There is a trade off there between frequency and temporal precision

Sure, and the FFT isn't inherently biased towards one vs the other. If you take an FFT over a long time window (narrowband spectrogram) then you get good frequency resolution at the cost of time resolution, and vice versa for a short time window (wideband spectrogram).

For speech recognition ideally you'd want to use both since they are detecting different things. TFA is saying that this is in fact what our cochlea filter bank is doing, using different types of filter at different frequency ranges - better frequency resolution at lower frequencies where the formants are (carrying articulatory information), and better time resolution at the high frequencies generated by fricatives where frequency doesn't matter but accurate onset detection is useful for detecting plosives.