TL;DR: They marginally improved on the best known academic attack on 7-round AES-128 (which normally uses 10 rounds - you do not need to worry about AES being broken).

The attack on HAWK is perhaps more interesting - they were able to halve the effective key length. HAWK is a candidate for NIST standardisation. It has been studied academically, but isn't really deployed anywhere (because it hasn't been standardised!)

It should be noted that the attack is not only an attack against a weakened AES, but it is also a chosen-plaintext attack.

It is standard in cryptography to analyze ciphers under this kind of attack, which is stronger than normal attacks, because a cipher that resists to a stronger attack will also resist to weaker attacks, so using the strongest possible attack increases the confidence in a cipher.

While using the strongest attack for testing a cipher remains the correct method, chosen-plaintext attacks are no longer realistic today, so even when a cipher appears somewhat vulnerable to such attacks that does not imply that it is vulnerable in normal use.

The reason is that the modes of operation for ciphers where the base cipher can be attacked with chosen plaintexts are obsolete. The most frequently used modes of operation are now modes like the counter mode (e.g. in AES GCM), where it is impossible to perform a chosen plaintext attack (i.e. where you must trick the victim to encrypt a text that you choose, but in counter mode the cipher only encrypts a sequence of numbers chosen by the intended victim, which cannot be influenced by the attacker).

How is this not the top comment?