I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
I believe that the history of English language usage is replete with examples such as "X times less than" when X > 1, but similar constructions for X <= 1 do not appear with appreciable frequency.
In any case, I think that continuing our conversation is unlikely to be productive, so this will be my last reply.
I will just say in closing that our conversation is a good example of why the MAGA folks have probably chosen phrasing such as this.
To be fair our conversation can be summarized as:
> only pedants misunderstand this, here's a 2 decade old source that doesn't support my claim, I rather not continue the conversation
so it was never meant to be productive