Beacon Hill village in Boston was the original of the stay in your home with communal help idea, but there are lots. If you read "Being Mortal," by Atul Gawande (and everyone should), there are stories about a number of options.

I can't imagine that in the alleged good old days people who were frail and in pain weren't cranky. The hand-wringing about people being neglected by their distant children irritates me. The estimates of the number of people doing unpaid care-giving in the US is forty million plus. Not all of those are boomers with elderly parents (some of them are probably elderly parents whose boomer children have cancer, just for one example), but everyone I know who still has parents is working on the best way for the parents to have care and love. Some people admittedly are doing so by throwing money rather than time at the problem, but it's my experience that many people are doing both.

To another of your points, though, my father's VA social worker told us that we are lucky that my parents have not be taken in by scams. She spend a lot of her time dealing with old guys who have been
cheated by those who target the elderly (at least some of whom can't read the fine print, even if there is any).