The house that we bought in 2010 has a “whole house fan”. It was built in 1987, so I don’t know how popular these fans are nowadays, but I can tell you that it works great! So well, in fact, that we never bothered to install AC, even though most of our neighbors have AC.
Here we get only 2–4 hot spells each summer, each lasting 2–3 days, so the whole house fan serves us well. Our house is fairly well insulated, so even on hot days it can be hot outside yet remain reasonably comfortable inside until about one hour before sundown. Then as soon as the sun sets, it starts to cool down, so we open several windows and start up the fan. In about 30 minutes, the house is noticeably cooler. So it’s only uncomfortably warm for an hour and a half on hot days, and if we happen to be out of the house during that time, it doesn’t affect us at all.
The only drawback is that the fan very noisy.