I agree. My experience is exactly the same. I’ve never seen or heard of this in over 50 years of car ownership, all in areas that use salt. Lots of salt.
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You have to be in the auto repair business to see this type of thing.
Tester
Bull.
…
Why haven’t you seen it then?
Because none of your vehicles had lug nuts with condoms!
Tester
I’ve never been so arrogant and pompous as to tell anyone “you need to be an engineer to know this”, so don’t pull your “superior” crap on me.
I’ve been driving, owning, and repairing cars (my own and friends) for over a half-century, including having hung around with buddies in our automotive technology degree programs for 17 years. This is not common. Clearly someone out there is using these crappy excuses for lug nuts, but the condition in the image is not common. And I suspect these are aftermarket lug nuts.
By the way, how long have YOU been working on cars?
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I have had this happen to several of the lug nuts on my '07 Dodge Ram. While not horribly unusual, I would hardly consider this to be “normal wear and tear”. There is no wear involved at all!
Buy a new set so you aren’t unpleasantly surprised some day when you get a flat tire.
I live and work in an area that gets little to no snow and when it does snow the roads are sanded, not salted. And I see the “swollen” nuts often enough that it’s not particularly unusual. It’s not a once a week thing, but certainly not a red flag thing. Lug nuts are cheap, adding $50 to a brake job isn’t a big deal for most people.
When the nuts swell up enough that a socket will no longer fit on them we use 19.5mm, 21.5mm, or 22.5mm sockets.
I don’t see many rust belt cars here, the problem with capped lug nuts that I frequently see is when a tire store uses the wrong size socket the stainless steel cap gets distorted and the proper size socket and the lug wrench in the trunk no longer fits.
Capped lug nuts have been around for a long time, my 1973 Plymouth has them and my Vega GT had them, well half of the lug nuts still had caps. I must have seen hundreds of bad lug nuts over the years.
At any price over a very few dollars per nut, they ought to be stainless steel and end of problem. Pathetic.
Unfortunately, stainless steel throughout is not as strong and tends to crack. That’s why car frames are not stainless. They wouldn’t last either.
THOSE look wicked! And effective! 
The obvious answer is to use steel rims with the much cheaper tapered lug nuts for winter then switch to summer tires and alloys with their more expensive collared lug nuts in the summer. That works for people with separate winter tires on rims. The winter steel rim lugs are cheap and nearly expendable. Getting chromed lug nuts helps too, but even that wears off. I have a life time supply of one off Toyota lug nuts from my bro in law compliments one off his mechanic friends. They’re worth having on hand your self so you don’t pay an inflated price in a time of need. Toyota has only made one size forever on some truck based models so it’s not hard to match them up.
That’s funny, because for the last 25 years, I’ve lived where there is hardly any snow and they, of course, don’t use salt, and me - a backyard mechanic - know about it.
I think it looks like a good option.
I have had many cars with the swollen lug nuts. S=ometimes it is from rust, sometimes it is from someone using the wrong size socket and sometimes it is from some on is using the wrong size scoket an cracks the overlay and rust swells it. If you have never seen it in the rust belt, you just haven’t owned cars with decorative caps.
With some of my work cars I just peeled the thin cap off and reinstalled the plain steel nuts.