LLMs can’t cite. They don’t know what a citation is other than a collection of text of a specific style

LLMs can cite. It’s called Retrival-Augmented Generation. Basically LLM that can do Information Retrival, which is just academic term for search engines.

You’d be lucky if the number of references equalled the number of referenced items even if you were lucky enough to get real sources out of an LLM

You can just print retrival logs into references. Well, kinda stretching definition of “just”.