What good would high refresh LCD do you in 1995-2005? From no acceleration at all to barely being able to run modern games at 40 fps (cod2 on 7800GTX in 2005).
CRT need high refresh, because they flash picture content at you. LCD do not flash, they maintain steady picture.
The main reason for 144 Hz refresh back then was not to tame normal CRT flicker. It was to get 72 Hz refresh of a stereoscopic pair. You had to use really fast phosphors to make this work and not have severe blurring/ghosting of the left and right images. Monitors intended for non-stereoscopic use could have slower phosphors which helped reduce the flickering effect at lower refresh rates.
Having this rapid refresh helped give persistence of vision for each eye, where if you had subdivided 72 Hz into 36 Hz cycle rates for a pair, you would have very annoying strobe effects visible to most people.
No application was rendering at 144 Hz. They might be lucky to sustain 20-30 Hz, but the framebuffer held both a left and right image and the video output switched back and forth between them on each frame scan. Complex visualizations often got down to 12 Hz or so and considered that acceptable as people would still perceive motion as in an animated cartoon.
CRT need high refresh, because they flash picture content at you. LCD do not flash, they maintain steady picture.