Does File metadata EXIF have the ability to retain EXIF data when Drupal resizes on upload

If you were using Imagemagick as the image toolkit, you would find that EXIF data is retained.

The GD toolkit, Drupal's core, conversely drops any EXIF data segment when manipulating images. That's because it's the behavior of the GD library itself.

The metadata taken via the EXIF plugin from the SOURCE image file could be reused to write it back to the TARGET image file uploaded, yes. The PEL library that the plugin uses allows that. But 1) I have concerns on the test coverage of PEL wrt rewriting, 2) in any case I do not think such a thing should be done in this module, rather some other code that could use this module.

Actually, ✨ Split ImageStyle into the config entity and a separate event-based image processing service Needs work in core would be a step forward towards allowing manipulating files during upload. But that's another story.