The course where I took up the game about 20 years ago kept the rough pretty sparse but there was no intermediate cut between there and the fairway. And since at the time they had single-row irrigation and quite wide fairways, the rough didn't get much water and wasn't lush at all unless it was a very rainy summer.
Pretty sure the guy who owned the course was far too cheap to have multiple kinds of mowers. In fact, I'd imagine at least as late as 1998 or so it was basically "the fairway mower" (quantity one) and "the greens mower" (quantity one). Mowing of the rough was with some pull-behind deal that looked like a bushhog to my untrained eye.
I clearly remember the summer they ugraded their irrigation and then started with the thick rough, intermediate cut, fairway cut and all that stuff. It was about five years after I had started playing and man, missing the fairway was all of a sudden a stroke wasted for me. To add insult to injury the new irrigation trimmed about 10-20 yards off the huge rollout I used to get in the fairways.
Fast forward a decade-plus and the original owner's son is back to pretty much his dad's early-90's maintenance. Hard, fast fairways (with cuppy lies) and there are two cuts of rough but the deeper cut is back to being hit or miss as to how much grass is there. I felt right at home when I played there recently for the first time in 10 years.