When I was traveling solo for a prolonged period of time, I occasionally booked with new hosts. They were substantially cheaper, and you could usually figure out if they were honest or not by having a quick conversation and carefully reading the listing. Never had any problems. At worst, the rooms were a bit dirty at times (which was fine by me). At best, they were some of the most attentive hosts I had, and I'm happy to watch their positive reviews grow over the years following my initial one.

There will always be people willing to take a risk.

Luckily enough for "power users", not everybody considers the motivations or risks around a gig economy. So there's always going to be some set of users out there willing to go through the vacation wood chipper that is a bad host.