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You are right. Rotary tuner sets were less common by '87. That set uses an RCA CTC136 chassis. I think the year was '86 when GE bought RCA. A year or so later, GE sold the RCA/GE consumer line to Thomson. I do believe this was the last RCA/GE color set to use a rotary tuner.
Actually, there were some "off brand" rotary tuner sets made up until '93, when the gov't required all sets 13" and above to have built in closed captioning decoding. I remember back around '93, one of our discount electronics stores was selling a Megatron brand 13" rotary tuned color TV for less than $100.
Most of the rotary tuned sets that I remember from the late '80's-early '90's were by samsung, goldstar, KTV, emerson, sharp, and a sears (which I think was a rebadged goldstar). I also remember seeing a 19" Zenith rotary tuned color TV from the late '80's.
There were a lot of older people who were used to knob tuned TV's and they felt intimidated by pushbutton sets; so, a few companies continued to produce rotary tuned sets for this market. It's possible that these sets might have been made after '93, had it not been for the CC mandate.
And, there was another type of rotary tuner that was popular in the '70's and '80's - the single knob varactor type. This tuner had the standard 2-13 VHF channel positions as well as several UHF positions on the same knob. Each channel position had, usually behind the control door, a set of "tuning preset" controls for each channel position. That way, the user could set up whatever channels they wanted for each channel position. This type of tuner was popular in Zenith, RCA, and Sylvania TV's.
Instead of a rotary knob, many sets had individual click style pushbuttons for each channel and many VCR's used this tuning format.
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