Livermore's centennial light, the world's longest-burning light bulb

You're implicitly assuming a normal distribution or something like it, but it's easy for a lognormal distribution to span multiple orders of magnitude like that, and the Weibull distribution commonly used in reliability modeling for this kind of thing can also be heavy-tailed if k > 1.

A simple physical example of how this could arise would be if the filament diameter of a batch of bulbs was normally distributed spanning a factor of 2, resulting in filament resistances spanning a factor of 4, resulting in filament powers spanning that same factor of 4, resulting in filament powers per unit area of filament surface spanning a factor of 2 (since the thickest filaments have the lowest resistance and thus the highest power at a fixed voltage; it'd be 8x instead on a constant-current source), resulting in filament Stefan-Boltzmann temperatures varying by about 19% (1.19 is the fourth root of 2), which works out to a temperature difference of about 200 K for filament temperatures of about 1000 K. That's probably (handwaving here) enough temperature difference for about an order of magnitude difference in vapor pressure, which (handwaving wildly at this point) might mean an order of magnitude difference in filament evaporation rate.

Also, typically there are hotspots in a filament where it's thinner than the rest, which evaporate more rapidly because they're hotter, which makes them get thinner faster, making them even hotter. So the dominating factor in filament lifetime (at a given voltage) might not be how thick it is but how smooth it is.

So, you might find out something interesting. Or you might just find that this bulb had an unusually thick or smooth filament.

(Carbon has 1000x higher vapor pressure than tungsten, though, which is relevant here: https://www.powerstream.com/vapor-pressure.htm.)

This bulb is a sample size of one. We might roughly know some details about its original construction and early operational life but not enough to really draw conclusions from. The only way to get more details about it will be a postmortem examination of its physical qualities.

Due to its age we have little knowledge of its specific construction details. Were the factory specs followed exactly (or even recorded) or was some of the fabrication machinery tuned by the operator? Did this bulb end up with thicker than normal glass or filament? What was the mortality rate of other bulbs in its batch? Does the fire station have better (or worse) than typical wiring? Did it have bad wiring early in the bulb's life to unintentionally under-load it?

Sometimes extreme outliers are just extreme outliers. A postmortem examination of the bulb might tell you it had a manufacturing defect giving it thicker than typical filament that combined with babying it for the past 50 years extended its life.

Sorry it's not just being contrarian. Outliers are outliers. Just because something is an outlier in a distribution doesn't automatically mean there's some hidden truth of the universe to be revealed.