Are you starting with an assumption that we are talking vectors? I thought dot product was like this: I walk a mile in an hour, how many miles can I walk in 3 hours? Scaler times a “thing” of some kind (dot product, a quantity). Cross product: basic electricity, V=IR. Suddenly two “things” are being multiplied together (current and resistence). Commonly, vector abstraction comes later. Isn’t that the essential weirdness of reality, the cross product, emergence of a new “quality”?