Even at the oldest it is likely to be, under the best possible conditions for the shortest possible lifespan, it will still likely spend another 150,000 years as a red supergiant before it collapses.
So I don’t believe your statement to be true. We could be wrong about the mass of Betelgeuse. We could be wrong about its age, its chemical composition, its rate of rotation, etc. We could be wrong about our theories of how red supergiants evolve. Any or all of those could lead us to incorrectly conclude that Betelgeuse won’t go supernova in our lifetime. But by our current cosmological understanding, it’s not that “it could go tomorrow or a hundred thousand years from now”. It’s that we’re pretty sure it won’t go for over a hundred thousand years. But if we’re wrong, it’s technically possible that it could happen tomorrow.
So people run spectral synthesis codes of varying complexity, essentially simulating the entire star, and tweak the parameters to get good agreement between observed and simulated spectra.
It is still more likely to occur in our lifetime than we would have guessed before--these sorts of dust-belching events are likely to happen right before the end. We just can't quantify that likelihood very well because this is the first time we've seen a (pre-)supernova in our stellar neighborhood in modern times.