An Epiphany

I'd have to say that's exactly as expected.

My wife would never touch my super expensive high end system.

Sounds like you two may need to review the SOPs you have in place for dealing with routine overdrinking.

Well for sure the stylus is wearing away the vinyl. Of that there is no doubt. Go look real close at the front of any cartridge that has been playing a long time. That thin layer of black dust is record vinyl scraped up by the stylus banging around back and forth chipping little bits off the groove walls.

Which if you imagine it carving along like a skier sorry wrong go listen to Ledermann talk about jitter.

Even tracking a perfectly smooth straight groove, which would be dead silent with virtually zero wear, what happens is the tiniest vibration gets the stylus/cantilever/suspension/motor mass vibrating at whatever its inherent resonance is, and this resonance is the "groove noise" you hear, which is really the stylus being banged back and forth bouncing off the walls like a drunk stumbling down an alley.

There's your record wear. Its so teeny tiny though you could play the thing for centuries, if not millennia, going through a lot of styli in the process, before it would wear through the record.

What the OP is talking about is the audiophile BS about the pressure of the stylus bringing the vinyl up to melting temperature and the LP need hours to recover before being played again.   It's always been nonsense.