Can’t recall if anyone has pointed out the possibility of liquid migration up the cantilever, to the suspension.
I’m pretty guilty of not cleaning my stylus often, and my records are fairly clean (though I don’t have a dust cover on my table)
I just carefully dry dip the stylus in Magic eraser from time to time. I really should get a USB microscope to see if I can detect build up, but not even sure if that would work.