It’s not really intended as a defense against being owned per se, it’s more about knowing what’s going on and getting an additional signal about the risk profile (not just from maliciousness) of the thing I’m about to run.
That said, I generally pipe to file and cat the file, yes, if only because it somehow feels wrong to download it twice.
I understand, but cating the saved file or printing from pipe to the terminal directly has identical issues. Terminal ANSI escape sequences are interpreted either way.
Save to file, and read the file in the editor.