I do not agree.
Any file copy operation should by default make a perfect copy of the source file, without losing any kind of metadata, because that is the meaning of the word. It is not advertised as a partial copy command.
Even when some metadata would be useless of the destination, the purpose of the copy may be to store temporarily the file in another place, with the intention to bring it back later to the original location, when no alteration should have happened to the file.
If a complete copy cannot be done, e.g. because the destination file system cannot store some of the metadata, e.g. it has timestamps with a lower precision or it does not store some of the extended attributes, like the Linux tmpfs file system, the copy operation should fail with an explicit error message, like when the destination does not have enough space for all file data.
Any file copy command should have options to strip some or all metadata from a file, when that is desired, but that should not be the default option.
In the past I had unpleasant surprises with the Linux coreutils or with ssh, which lost silently metadata, even with the appropriate command-line options, which should not have been needed, in the case of coreutils because they had a compilation option to ignore the extended attributes and that option had been used in the binary packages available for certain Linux distributions.
When copying over the network, I always use rsync over ssh, because it copies reliably all metadata, even between different operating systems and file systems, e.g. Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.