As I understand it, both statements are somewhat correct. For recordings made in the early 1960s, they were made to 3-track tape. That doesn't mean that only 3 microphones were used - the recordings were multimiked but it wasn't one mike per track. Rather they would go to different microphones as appropriate in making the recording, but only used 3 tracks, because tape with more tracks was not widely available.
As things moved into the later 60s and the quad era you started seeing 4, 8, and then 16 track tape. Most quad recordings were made in the era where at least 8 track tape was used, and then the quad master was made from the 8 or 16 track master. So in theory one could create a 5-channel mix of a recording released commercially in quad from the multitrack masters.
That said, and bringing it back to Bernstein, it's kind of shocking how poor a job Sony Classical has done with multichannel SACD releases of quad recordings - can anyone point to a good one? By contrast, they seem to do a pretty good job with the 3-channel recordings from earlier, even if the rears have to be synthetic.
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