Well "cycles" is good enough as a metaphor to convey the idea we are talking about a resource cost.
At least "cycles" and "ETH per cycles" makes it very obvious that you should multiply them to find the fee. On the other hand it's completely unintuitive you should multiply "price" and "cost" to calculate the fee. If gasCost was called gasQuantity, at least it would have been a little more logical (multiplying price with quantity).