My elderly mother-in-law is pretty good about the scams but the part that I can’t understand is that she treats every land line phone call as the highest priority thing in the house. She will drop everything to answer the phone.
OTOH I'm in that age group. I dropped my landline a long time ago, and I never answer calls on my mobile unless the caller is in my address book. I don't have voice mail either. The habit of answering the phone was not hard to stop, there was a bit of FOMO (if you can call it that) for a while, but every time I answered such a call it was a scammer or a survey or some other nonsense so that's pretty much gone away.
Maybe for those that are truly elderly it's just something to break up the boredom of sitting at home.
isn't that standard for most providers? plus, even if most of the calls are scams or pointless, some might not be, and I'd rather get a message than not.
I'm 30 and haven't been able to break myself of this. When I was a kid scam calls just were not a thing where I lived and if someone was calling it mattered. Absolutely nothing took priority over the phone.