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You gotta understand something. It's all speculation.
There's no official rules stating a pope has to be a certain age. There's no procedural factors that make it mandatory.
This means that unless the Cardinals over time state that age was a factor in their voting, the rest of us can only guess, and the Cardinals involved in the election are supposed to never reveal what goes on during the voting.
While it's definitely possible to apply sound reasoning into why popes tend to be well past middle age overall, there have been popes under 50, and even a couple under 40. One was a pope multiple times, and was first elected at 12. That's Benedict the 9th, and it was over a thousand years ago, but still.
The Cardinals are supposed to be picking the pope based on their worthiness to be pope, but there's been plenty of times where it was politics and power mongering all the way.
Like any institution, the church has changed and shifted over its incredibly long history, with all the ups and downs of its influence, wealth, and power. So, obviously, selection of leadership isn't always the same.
In our lifetimes, we've not had anyone under their 50s. And there seems to be a general trend towards popes with known and proven ranges of belief about the major issues that the church aristocracy deems important.
To me, that points to selection excluding younger candidates because it's hard to have a reasonable certainty about a candidate's specific beliefs on a given issue until they've had time to show their beliefs, or speak about them consistently. However, that assumes all the Cardinals are acting in good faith, with the pun being both intentional and relevant.
I think it can be safely argued that the popes of the last fifty years have been compromise picks. Fairly conservative in most things, but with outlying stances that move away from established practice. And I use conservative not in the standard political way, but with it being more about "conserving" established dogma and policies within the church. That those policies match other uses of conservative is true, but one doesn't have to follow the other.
When a candidate is a compromise it tends to end up where the need for a body of reputation and history is even more important during negotiations and arguments about who to elect, so it would make sense that age would be a factor because of that.
But even all of those conclusions are speculation, it just includes the reasoning for that speculation.
That was really interesting thanks