This detail, an important difference between The Godfather III (1990) and The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone (2020) has been bugging me since you pointed it out.
I have looked at wikis, Godfather websites, asked Claude.ai, and, crucially, asked my wife, who watched the movie with me. I have come to this conclusion: I misremembered.
It seems weird. But I can’t very well ignore the clear evidence. And as a denizen of the internet community that gave the world Anyone else remember the alternate ending to “Big?”—whose OP was @Mahaloth himself!—I can hardly deny the ability of people to misremember key details of movies.
But it’s weird when it happens to you, especially when it’s a movie you’ve seen quite recently!