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The reason Signal does this is that they consider your deivce storage ‘unsafe’, as it can be more easily accessible by other apps. AFAIK not providing the option to let you do it anyway is purely because the Signal devs don’t want to.
Threema for example has an option to save all received media to normal storage, similar to WhatsApp.
One drawback of the steamdeck is its size and weight though, it’s significantly bulkier than a switch. Still well worth the tradeoff though imo.