It seems there was a lot of rating inflation in chess, but at the top level, at least, it's stopped - the number of players over 2700 has been pretty constant for 5-10 years, a few dozen players. In 1990, only Kasparov and Karpov were rated over 2700.

https://2700chess.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990_in_chess