The weird behaviour happened to me as well. I had the following setup:
A.xcframework linked to --> Internal-Framework-A (not Embedded);
Internal-Framework-A linked into --> the AppTarget;
A.xcframework linked and Embedded into the AppTarget so it's available to the Internal-Framework-A.;
What worked for me was setting A.xcframework as Optional in Build Phases > Link Binary with Libraries in the Internal-Framework-A project.
More information about what that means can be found at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33038137/xcode-and-optional-frameworks .
Maybe this scenario doesn't make that much sense in your situation.