Fuel filters these days actually last a lot longer than that unless something unsavory has happened.

My Supra's fuel filter is in a really difficult place to reach. People curse Toyota for where they put it, but the engineers put it there because they were trying to keep people from wasting money on fuel filters. They consider it a life-of-the-vehicle filter from the factory. I think Toyota went back to putting it in an accessible place later after all the negative feedback. They decided it was better to let people swap out the filter for ten bucks than think the engineers were dumb.

If you contaminate the gas tank with something, the filter will still clog, though. That's its job, after all. And if you really want to swap it out, it's not going to hurt much of anything if it turns out that the filter wasn't the problem.