In the good ol' days when I ran out of battery and every charger had a different stupid little connector, I often put my phone on the window still or heater to get a little bit of juice to do what I needed to do.
IIRC freezing accelerates the chemical degradation of lithium ion (especially if you attempt to charge the battery at the same time) and tends to lower both the voltage and amperage of most battery chemistries, but it seems plausible that this might
temporarily defeat a cell protection circuit, allowing a charging procedure to initialize, or
delay a thermal failsafe cut-off of a damaged cell long enough to boot or charge a device
Regardless, for those tuning in at home, best to keep your batteries out of the freezer, especially lithium types, unless spicy pillows are what you’re after.
Ah! Yeah it’s been a while but I seem to recall seeing alkaline batteries in a some freezers or refrigerators sometimes when I was a kid, along with other curiosities like rolls of film. No one ever explained why.