But we're not counting anything!

We're dealing with abstract numbers "eight" and "three".

So the result is not twenty-four somethings, but simply another abstract number, twenty-four -- which I suppose works more like a quantity.

And a Google search for "how many is eight times" (including quotes) gives three results for me (well, four, but two of them are the same result) -- "how much is eight times" gives many.