The EXIF data removal is intentional, both for privacy considerations (many people are not aware that their location and other details may be present in photos they upload) and for optimisation. On the optimisation side, it’s not infrequent that images contain thumbnails in the EXIF data or large ICC profiles that are not useful for web display - it wouldn’t be very good for optimisation if we resized to a thumbnail but ended up keeping an even larger unoptimised thumbnail in the EXIF data 
It may be that we can be more selective in the EXIF data that is kept, things like copyright info etc would be generically useful.