Okay, well that's not Matlab lying, that's you not understanding how the tool works. It would be like saying that 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 evaluating to false is a lie, because floating point numbers don't accurately represent real numbers as a concept. But floating point numbers aren't actually real numbers, and integers in Matlab (they're actually stored as floating point doubles, is that a lie too?) aren't actually mathematical objects.

You have to work within the constraints of the tool. Matlab makes it very clear upfront that the semantics of the language mean that naked numbers are in fact matrices, because everything in the language is a matrix. Maybe you feel that's not a good representation, but it's not a lie, and in fact it's very consistent and useful in the context of the language itself.