Crease distortion occurs immediately, day 1, first fold, and it’s a substantial distortion… but does not necessarily get exponentially worse like normal fatiguing plastic, but instead just gets worse slowly. Yeah it’ll last 50k folds but the crease distortion is definitely there in person.
This changes the rules though from check at the end to check at every letter. That’s where the real efficiency gain is… The insertion of an all knowing checker who could have written it himself anyway. The math of permutations vs combinations changes drastically if we change the rules.