If it was anyone else I would say they were mistaken but I know that you know very well what you're dealing with. I think you must just have been unlucky. I buy a lot of hard rubber pens from the first couple of decades of the 20th century. Finding one that has tipping completely worn away is very rare. Bear in mind that 1 mm of tipping material will last for many years – especially now that we no longer only have one pen that we use all the time.
Of course, prior to World War II, manufacturers were much more careful about how much tipping material they applied compared with what we see on many modern pens. I have the practically unused Blackbird that I wrote about here recently, before me. It has only a tiny spot of tipping material, nothing like the huge blobs that we see on some pens today.
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