Taking example of Signal, I need to save each and every image manually to be me available outside its sandbox. Why is it like that rather than making it easy for me to use things that have been explicitly sent to me?
I have used another messaging app called Twin Me which also does something similar.
I always used WhatsApp earlier that allowed me access to the media downloaded in chats and let me take local backups but unfortunately they now allow only Google backups!
It’s not a matter of freedom, it’s a question of desired functionality. If anything, keeping your data in a sandboxed area by default respects your freedom more (that is, freedom from other apps scraping your data).
If it’s on Github, you could file a feature request to have that default behavior changed.