Most young corporate employees are promoted on a schedule. The inputs to that algorithm are age and performance.
Large companies explicitly discriminate against young employees by paying them less and refusing to promote them without considering their age.
You're probably conflating age and experience level here. You also seem to be assuming that people necessarily get promoted at regular intervals based on age - that's flat-out demonstrably not true. If it was true, everyone at age X would be a manager, everyone at age Y would be a director, etc. I've consulted with a lot of big cos and it's extremely common to see people well into their 40s who haven't made it to a manager role, and certainly most people will never make director no matter how old they get.
What happens is that there tend to be implicit experience minimums, not age minimums. To get to manager you need X years experience in the industry/department, director requires Y years, etc. If you start later in life, the age at which you hit that minimum will change. Big co promotions are also tied into politics and visibility of things you've worked on. Plenty of young people shoot up the ranks quickly because they're either well-connected or talked/lucked their way into working on something of high importance and visibility to the company early on.
"You aren't a manager, therefore your career is a stalled-out failure" is a pretty outdated view. It's getting to be the norm for companies (at least in tech) to have parallel career tracks for managers and individual contributors. Principal/staff engineers at big tech companies have more responsibility and higher compensation than almost any of their management-track colleagues. I'll grant you that the very top position (CEO) is always a management role, though.