I don't get the fun of it. Also, you just need like 1 cheater to tilt you. And that's enough. This feels like a chore more than a fun experience. I genuinely miss going to a club since I moved away from my last club, but now I think it's time to find one nearby. 
Maybe I can finally quit playing online altogether. In this sense, maybe a proliferation of cheaters is not a bad thing after all if it ends up reviving local clubs.
Honestly, it is online chess.
You have to take it as a given that on the internet, because of the anonymity, you will run into
1. What you describe
2. very rude people who have lost the ability to socialize properly because they only have interactions online
3. racists. bigots, etc
4. "keyboard cowboys" who will be all tough and call you names, insult you or your family member, make threats, etc.
Report them and move on if you want to stay. Leave if you don't want to deal with them.
If you stay, find a good, honest group of people to play with and form a club where you all can meet and play. But you have to work to grow the group or the play gets stagnant.
There are also some longer time control tournaments where the organizers try their best to weed out the undesirables.
The site isn't gaslighting. It publishes data on the number of accounts closed for fair play violations each month, invests heavily on cheat detection and has a whole team of staff dedicated to fair play and detection.
However, the assumptive level of cheating is a lot higher than the actual incidence and the site has previously published statistics on that as well, based on the actual levels seen on site versus the number of reported and checked games.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/online-chess-cheating
So, the site's absolutely knows there's a problem with cheating in online Chess and actively works on combating it spending money, staff hours, and development on the problem.
That all said, discussions about cheating, potential cheating, or cheat detection are not allowed in the general forums. If you would like to discuss, join the following club.
https://www.chess.com/club/cheating-forum
I recently cancelled my membership, and to my surprise "way too many cheaters" was not one of the feedback options. No wonder why chess.com doesn't get that message.
The problem is not with people who constantly cheat though. The problem are the people who when losing enable whatever new addon they got and suddenly they play super-fast with very high (but not perfect accuracy), just like they called over their GM cousin to play for them a few moves. I do receive those messages that people of the former group are banned and they refunded me some elo points, but I've never seen any of the latter group get caught.
This trend is so disheartening that I'm thinking to completely let go of online chess, and go back to the club again to play few blitz games OTB once or twice a week instead.