To me, this is akin to finding out what happens to airplanes when their pilots die. If we're wondering about this because they have been dying of asphyxiation a

To me, this is akin to finding out what happens to airplanes when their pilots die. If we're wondering about this because they have been dying of asphyxiation at altitude, we'd still learn something if we ran the experiment of shooting them dead at altitude. The conditions aren't exactly the same, but we'll still figure out that pilots are important to airplanes. The other thing worth noting is that there could be some confusion from the title. It has "aging-associated" in it. The charitable understanding is along the lines of my analogy. The uncharitable, and seemingly popular one, is along the lines of your counterargument, and I think interprets "aging-associated" as "due to or consequent of aging," rather than "due to a cause that is similar on one level to causes that come about by aging."