Why do we die of old age in the first place? My money's on it being a strongly positive evolutionary force for a species. Almost all organisms age. It would make sense to me that the ones that tried not aging are gone now, likely because they were much much worse at adapting to changing conditions than ones that could reroll the dice every generation. I would further guess that the healthy oldsters filled up their ecological niche and blocked the young individuals from gaining a foothold.

But that argument doesn't prevent limited mechanisms, and conditional mechanisms in particular would still be rewarded. Conditional mechanisms provide much more short term adaptability to changing conditions, without damaging the long term species-wide adaptation.

There are intriguing parallels with centrally planned vs market economies.