It was barbaric. The transition to 100% digital was a slow walk. In the 90s, I was an assistant editor at a film/video post house. Avid's Film Composer quality wasn't very good and only considered offline quality. The film was transferred to video which was then captured into the Avid. Once the edit was final, it was dumped to a 3/4" and the EDL exported to green bar on a dot matrix printer. The tape and print out was sent back to the film lab where they would load up the film negative based on the print out and then compared to the tape frame by frame to ensure it was correct before actually cutting the negative. The print out indicated if a shot was reused in the edit as that would require creating a dupe neg, as you obviously can't use the same strip of film in more than one place.

When the film was transferred to tape, the tapes only recorded at 29.97 which meant 2:3 pulldown. Capturing tape in Film Composer required starting on an A-frame so it could properly remove the pulldown. This was only for editing video for film. If it was only a video edit, the pulldown was left in. The CMX would attempt to keep the sequence across the edit, but not all editors would keep the pulldown sequence intact. That's been a pain ever since now that we have progressive every where.

Even into the 2010s I knew of use of professional betacam (HDCAM) cassettes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacam