These articles bring back memories of teachers telling me I was wrong, because I didn't use the quadratic formula, but completed the square instead.
You can definitely see multiplication as repeated addition. It's even a useful thing to do, how else would you define multiplication?
This is the whole idea that made mathematics great. You define more complicated operations in terms of familiar operations. Then, if you gained enough intuition you are ready to use these more complicated operations as primitives as well. Then, you can generalize and apply your intuition to more abstract objects.
You can definitely see multiplication as repeated addition. It's even a useful thing to do, how else would you define multiplication?
This is the whole idea that made mathematics great. You define more complicated operations in terms of familiar operations. Then, if you gained enough intuition you are ready to use these more complicated operations as primitives as well. Then, you can generalize and apply your intuition to more abstract objects.