It seems like you got snared by the title. My gut reaction was the same, but I was pleasantly surprised by the article. Its main point is that ageing follows a

It seems like you got snared by the title. My gut reaction was the same, but I was pleasantly surprised by the article. Its main point is that ageing follows a roughly Gompertz-Makeham distribution, the statistics of which also nicely describe "wear-and-tear" processes like protein breaking. The final paragraph even explicitly addresses the concerns you raise about possible routes to intervention in ageing processes.