My understanding is that yes, it actually is normalized to have the lengths all be the same, and thus the angle from (hyperdimensional) 0,0,0,(...n) is all that

My understanding is that yes, it actually is normalized to have the lengths all be the same, and thus the angle from (hyperdimensional) 0,0,0,(...n) is all that matters. The "distance between two embeddings" is able to simply to cosign of the two angles.