In the UK having lots of nursing homes also caused a massive problem. They're usually responsible for their own PPE, but that obviously became infeasible since the government could both seize shipments and outbid them on behalf of the NHS. So the government had to stand up a network to get PPE to thousands of care homes as well as all the hospitals and clearly didn't have an existing plan to do that quickly.

I don't see why having larger nursing homes makes it harder to control how many people get the virus in general. Yes it might affect the death toll, but how's that change the fact that both Denmark and Norway has halted the spread of the virus while it's still spreading uncontrollably in Sweden?

Isn't it much easier to control a few large nursing homes than lots of small ones? In Germany all nursing homes where off limits for everyone.