No, we did have higher sampling rates back then. It's worth knowing a bit about trends: At the end of the 90's we had higher sample rates but no one used them because no distributor wanted higher, there was no consumer demand and no point loosing all the additional computing resources required to process them. For roughly the first five years or so of the millennium, some ADCs/DACs operated slightly more transparently at 96kHz and a number of plug-in processors also worked better at higher than 48k, particularly non-linear, soft-synth and modelling plugins. Today most of those potential advantages are gone. While some plug-ins do still operate better at higher sample rates, this is handled by the plug-ins themselves up-sampling, processing and down sampling again, all internally, before passing the audio back to the DAW. Plug-in output quality has improved tremendously over the last decade and many who swore vehemently about their tinny, digitally harsh sound are now converts and their once treasured hardware units are gathering dust in a cupboard. Pro quality ADCs/DACs also no longer generally perform better at 96kHz and at no time in history has it ever been recommended to use 192kHz. Indeed, Pro Tools (DigiDesign/AVID), published a paper specifically advising against 192kHz, on audio quality grounds, rather than computing power requirements. Today "they absolutely" do not record at high sampling rates. Quite a few still record at 96kHz, either because they have an older ADC/DAC which performs better at that rate, or because they haven't kept up with developments in the last 5-10 years and don't realise there is no longer any logical reason for higher sample rates than 44.1/48k. The only pros who record at 192kHz are those employed to by record labels, to fulfil a demand for 192k some labels have helped create, otherwise, no one I know (or have heard of) would willing record at 192k.
Your down-sampling concerns are unfounded. They weren't so unfounded 15 or so years ago when it was generally recommended to avoid a non-simple multiples, but they are today. These days, unless you've got very old or incompetently programmed software, conversion from 192k to 48k or 44.1 should be equally transparent. In fact, it's extremely likely that any fairly recent commercial recordings you own have been up and down sampled multiple times, possibly even dozens of times, as part of the modern mixing process, as it's a standard built in procedure of many plug-ins, which btw is performed automatically in the background with the mix engineer not even aware it's occurring. My advice, if you're getting back into recording/mixing/producing is to stick with 44.1 or 48kHz, there's no benefit to the higher sample rates which isn't already accounted for. If you feel strongly about higher sample rates, 88.2 or 96k are fine, apart from the near halving of your resources of course, avoid 192k though, unless you have a very specific requirement!
G