Perhaps the context of the question got lost because it wasn't tagged as wwdc2022-10032 when I opened the forums from the Developer app, my bad.

This doesn't really answer the question. I am aware what intents are for and how navigation works in SwiftUI. However in the WWDC Session from this year (10032) they clearly say it's possible. May not be recommended (which I also state in the first post), but it's possible. I just need to understand how the "Navigator" object is implemented so I can better understand how the "perform" method works in general.

Regarding your first paragraph, no, OP does want @MainActor here. @MainActor means that all updates to the object will occur in the main thread. Any networking called within the @MainActor object can still take place in different threads, and the downloads themselves can take place somewhere else. Using @MainActor means their content will be delivered to the main thread, which is what you want with code that updates the UI. It does not mean async calls will take place in the main actor.