It’s actually extremely critical to strip meta data by default. Cameras and browsers both have a concept of orientation meta data, but nobody has standardised or agreed on how that should be implemented or handled, so 50% of the images get rotated 90 degrees and displayed in the wrong orientation by the browser - which is a nightmare that affects the majority of all users and inconveniences them.
Additionally photo meta data has a very unfortunate habit of leaking private user information including identity and location, which is not at all desirable.
The defaults in Ghost are designed to handle the most common usecases which affect the majority of users. If you’re using advanced colour profiles that require special handling, then you are - by definition - operating in a specialist environment which doesn’t make sense for most people.
You can disable image optimisation completely if you want full control, as Naz has already mentioned above - or you can swap out Ghost’s image handling entirely and use a service like Cloudinary for advanced image handling:
https://docs.ghost.org/integrations/cloudinary/
There are plenty of options available to you.