Yes and no. The 6502 die size was tiny compared to most 16 bit and all 32 bit cpus. It was ALWAYS going to be cheaper. For quite some time (maybe even still) WDC had a great business selling 6502 family cores matched with semi-custom IO on the same die as device controllers.

But the IIgs was a crazy machine. My mom brought one home for a couple months when the school district she worked at adopted them. It was surprisingly usable, though the screen resolution was a bit low.

I dunno. The 6502 looks pretty large with this version.

https://monster6502.com/

I'm sure there's a die-shrink coming soon

Fun fact: The Macintosh II (68020) had two 6502 processors on its motherboard, somewhere in the I/O system. Originally intended to do some kind of I/O acceleration, they were never used by MacOS. I heard they just ran Mandlebrot-generation test code.

The IIfx, Quadra 900 & Quadra 950 each have two 6502 processors. They offload ADB processing (keyboard and mouse), the floppy disk and serial ports. MacOS uses all of them, NetBSD can use ADB offload.

Oh, cool! I thought that only A/UX had made use of them.