Yes, but you are not going to be doubling the contact patch just by a little wear. In any case having to up the cartridge tracking weight would be a clue.
I can certainly hear when a cartridge is not tracking well whether that is by weight or bias settings. I will hear the performance drop off through lack of clarity/focus, increase in noise/hiss and introduction of sibilance a long time before something is so bad it will skip and not track.
You are talking extremes it just won’t get that bad before the performance drops off.
My somewhat unscientific approach has always been that when my streamer/CD player sounds more engaging than my turntable then it is time for a new stylus. So long as vinyl rules then the stylus is, probably, just fine.
Jonathan Carr is the designer of all the Lyra cartridges (incl. the two Atlas I use). This is what he had to say in a post on the Audiogon forums:
Stylus wear is always affected by the cleanliness of the LPs being played, but if you clean your LPs with a suction cleaner or ultrasonic machine, the microridge stylus of the Delos should easily last 2500 hours. Stylus wear is also affected by how clean you keep the stylus, and clean LPs combined with an always-clean stylus should get you up to around 3000.
Total cartridge life is also affected by other factors such as how well-damped the tonearm elevator mechanism is,
Some users can get more than 3000 hours, but they tend to use tonearms with gentle elevators, very few contaminents in the air, and no sunlight or ultraviolet hitting the audio system, which is not so common, I think.
FWIW, the microridge stylus used in the Delos has been designed specifically so that changes in shape as it wears are minimal. The playing surfaces have a side radius of 2.5 micrometers, and are located on a protruding ridge which has parallel surfaces only 5 micrometers apart. This narrow, confined structure imposes a limit on how large the radius can increase to, as the stylus wears.
In marked contrast, nearly every other stylus shape has a larger side radius to begin with, and the playing surfaces are located on a triangular structure (as seen from directly above or below). You can see one such example at the following link, in a post by DaleH, showing photos of a Fritz Gyger S stylus.
The angles of the triangular structure are fairly large, and this allows the playing radius to increase steadily as the stylus wears. What this also means is that resolution dwindles steadily over the stylus lifespan. The OCL falls into the same basic category, AFAIK.
Stylus wear depend on dirty/clean records, tracking weight and how precise the tracking is. If it’s microscopically bouncing around the groove, your stylus and vinyl won’t last as long. Set-up, stylus quality and arm quality all matter.
Rough figure I wouldn’t be worried about until 1,000+ hours play and the suspension components about 8 years.