That's a weird thing to say. There are a lot of otherwise quite sophisticated chips that don't do multiplication. Multiplication is a pretty high bar, so the 6502 coming in below isn't much of a surprise.
Has the situation here really gotten so bad that no one can tell at a glance that they're responding to mindless LLM texts?
For something more modern, have a look at how the basic variants of Risc-V don't include multiplication.
A very basic pocket calculator might not have multiplication as an instruction, but multiply by running a simple multi-instruction program. That's how people multiplied on a 6502, too. (Similar also for calculation cosine or square-roots or logarithms: you run a little program.)