Just the .dmg from their site. No idea why your defaults would be different from mine.

Why is it even a "feature" in the first place? It's not the kind of thing I'd expect to even have to worry about whether it defaulted to on or off.

Inkscape probably treats the source SVG differently than an optimized output SVG and includes additional data to make editing the file better. Other apps use a proprietary format for their source files that contains this additional information and have to export to an open format for output.

Probably for copyright and license. It's a common feature, MS Office documents include even more metadata, such as how many times the file has been saved.

My problem isn't with quantity of metadata. It's with personally-identifying data. And I can't imagine what the filepath could ever have to do with copyright or license.

I don't see how this is a common feature at all.

The only way I can reproduce your scenario is by inserting an image using "Link" instead of "Embed".

Other than that, was it part of the original/downloaded file?

You can include links to other resources (e.g., an image) in an SVG file. Perhaps it's meant to help resolve those paths?

Sorry I thought you were worrying about your PII and the filepath as two different things.