Groove damage should be fairly obvious. It will tend to raise its ugly head most obviously as a kind of crackling distortion on very dynamic passages. No amount of cleaning will get rid of it (I find that with a really dirty record, you may need to clean and vacuum two or three times with each subsequent cleaning following 2 or 3 plays of the record to "get the rocks out". That being said, not all Living Stereos or Columbia 6 Eyes or whatever are going to sound great. Some of them, yes, all of them no.
Living Stereo sound bad?
Sorta a sidebar to another of my threads but, I recently bought a bunch of original Living Stereo label LPs. The guy I bought 'em from had them stacked like flap jacks. When I cleaned the records, the pops and ticks were relatively far and few between but, I would've expected the sound quality to be much better. Does the reputation of these records apply to ALL the Living Stereo records or just a few? Could the way they were stacked have caused any damage? Could they have been played on a junky table that caused groove damage? Just curious.