8 years later and I'm still waiting... Please consider adding this.
I hit this problem every few weeks when I export something that I know is a path, but it comes out as a circle or rect in the SVG. It really matters for my particular use case because I need the output to be a path for further processing.
It could be argued that this is actually a bug. Designer shouldn't really be changing my design unless I ask it to.
Surely it can't be that hard to add an "Optimise paths" option (for example) on the SVG export dialogue, which can be checked by default to preserve the existing behaviour. But when unchecked it should bypass the optimisation code.
