Intercepting <a download> Causes a Push Navigation

[absurdprofit]

I was testing the use case of extending the download behaviour of anchor tags. For example we might want to extend it with the File System API:

<a href="src/assets/art.jpeg?fileType=jpeg" download="Cover Art" />

navigation.addEventListener("navigate", (e) => {
  if (e.downloadRequest) {
    e.intercept({ handler: async () => {
      const url = new URL(e.destination.url);
      const params = Object.fromEntries(url.searchParams.entries());
      const { fileType } = params; // additional metadata
      // get a file handle and create writable stream
      const fileHandle = await window.showSaveFilePicker({
        types: [FileTypes[fileType]],
        suggestedName: e.downloadRequest
      });
      const writable = await fileHandle.createWritable();
      // manually fetch the file and write to fileHandle
      const { body } = await fetch(url);
      body?.pipeTo(writable);
    }});
  }
});

However currently this snippet causes the download request to become a "real" push navigation and I end up at the destination URL, in this case src/assets/art.jpeg?fileType=jpeg.

Coming from the model of how unintercepted download requests work where they don't actually push on to the history stack this is a bit confusing and leaves me feeling like I'm missing something here.