What is the cheapest way to capture similarity if not via dot product then?
Means squared error instead of dot product, it's not cheaper but it's close
If you want to go cheaper you could use sum of abs of differences.
For a lot of embeddings we have today, norm of any embedding vector is roughly of same size, so the angle between two vectors is roughly same size as length of difference that you are saying, and can be expressed in terms of 1 - dot product after scaling
You're probably best off using the commercial suggestion, and if its dot product, go for it. I am no expert in this area and my interest wanes every day.