Maybe. But why in this case do we not see bugs and failures in this program, i.e. no one lived 5 times more than the average or did not live forever at all, for example? I'm not making a statement, just a guess.
Imagine the "aging program" bugs out 1 in 100 times, a pretty high failure rate. However, imagine the program runs in 10 systems in the body, and success in any one of these systems is enough to age and kill you. The body is quite fragile after all.
If this were the case, then in order to not age at all, a person would need not just a 1/100 event to occur, but a (1/100)^10 event to occur. That's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000. In other words, one in a hundred quintillion.
A hundred quintillion is about 840 million times higher than the number of humans who have ever lived, which is 120 billion.
There's extensive scientific research on the subject of aging if you care to sink time into reading about it.
Consider one of the many examples of embedded systems that suffered from subtle bugs that were dependent on environmental factors after they were left running for too long. The official manufacturer provided solution was to reboot (ie there is no solution). Now imagine someone in a comment section somewhere proposes the idea that these bugs are actually intentional program features. That's the scientific level this discussion is at.
But that's just guessing. The article might not even have found something profound, but a life-style effect. On the one hand, we're living long (historically speaking), on the other hand, we have unnatural habits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_people
And another was 76cm high:
The "patterns of aging" you describe are, again, definitionally just what happens when the same organs built and functioning the same way across species undergo their respective failure modes. It makes more sense for all skins to exhibit the same signs of aging if they're all just wearing out the way "skin" does, rather than being attacked by species-specific "age limiter" processes artificially enforcing lifespan limits. Why would something like skin even need to decay at all, when it's basically unrelated to aging-related death?
It's the same as how although you can occasionally get a "natural" person over seven feet tall, it's very rare. Most really tall people have gigantism or some other form of pituitary abnormality, and I believe every recorded person to break eight feet has had such an abnormality.
It's like asking why we've never had someone with 500 IQ. There's a hard limit where anyone with enough of a mutation to enable that would probably also not survive long at all. And indeed with the height thing we see a lot of super-tall people dying younger due to cardiovascular strain and other issues. You get the picture.