Thanks Jeff!
One think I noticed simming both a historical game and a standard game past of 2023 is that the same player usually retire earlier in historical.
I checked the aging attribute for a handful of them on both of them and most players that are young now (drafted after 2017) have aging between 8 and 11 - but I'm not sure if anything else factors in a player's decision on when to retire.
In the screenshots I posted you can already see it: Karlsson has 16 in standard and 12 in historical and Boldy has 13 and 10. I did not check if these ratings change during their careers...
