[davidgould]

If you want a more modern microcontroller that can actually be used to make things, take a look at the 8 bit STM8 series. They are widely used (you may have a few already, toasters, rice cooker, car etc). They definitely have that 6502 flavor, although even closer to being MC6800 improved, (eg 16 bit index registers), plus a good set of timers, ADCs, UARTs, SPI, I2C etc.

Official "Discovery boards" from ST include a programmer and debug connection for under $10, and cheap dev boards are plentiful. Open source C compiler SDCC, and free tools from ST.

There is also a very good Forth [0]. Even if Forth is not your thing the site has a lot of good information on STM8.

[0] https://github.com/TG9541/stm8ef