It seems to me more like determinants are often badly motivated. The way I remember it from Apostol's Calculus was like "a volume multiplier would be very useful; it needs to be a signed volume for linearity, which implies antisymmetry. Here are axioms collecting these requirements. They're uniquely satisfied by the determinant. Proof: ..."

Agreed that it should help if you got to learn wedge products first (I didn't).