It does if you feed into it at the wrong speed, and the teeth don't self-clean...
When cutting steel, the same rules of cutting feeds and speeds, as well as tooth contact and cutting power... apply as they would with any other material, it's just that the material's tensile strength warrant operation in a substantially different ratio.
You're running wood at 1200+fpm, steel would be more like 120fpm... and instead of 2-4tpi, you're running 10-15 tpi... and instead of 2-10" thick, you're running 0.1-0.2" thick.
With high-strength material, you NEVER want to run a blade that has less than two teeth in contact with the cutting surface at any given time (snagged tooth).
In all cases, the concept of mechanical material cutting still applies- when the speed and feeds are appropriate, the HEAT generated from ripping tiny pieces off a parent material, gets carried away in the chip, not passed into the parent metal, or the cutting tool.
AND... in order to make it do this all properly, the incoming parent must be fed fast enough for it to cut and shed, which means that if you chose to run the blade really fast, you need to feed it really fast, and have a whole lotta horsepower behind it. If you do the first two at say... 10x, you'd need to apply the third at say... 10x...
I've converted a very stout (but not rare or exotic, and much smaller) bandsaw to metal cutting by putting a gear reduction housing on a belt-drive, and chain-driving the lower wheel... cuts at about 100fpm with an 18t blade, but it's a small table, and I just use it for making vertical cuts in something that requires odd angle cuts... like fitting up small parts. Extremely handy, because I'll invariably be working on something and then Dangit... I wish this here, had a notch over this way... and then I remember the old Frankenstein saw...
The Variable Frequency Drive is a wonderful thing... I have VFDs on all but a scant few of my machine tools. If you pick the right one, you can feed 240v single phase to it, and get 3 phase out... at any speed (including zero, and well over 2x the original speed), and with proper planning, you can get well above the motor's original design power if necessary. They're small, quiet, and provide two other features- Soft start (bringing up the machine slow, and limiting current draw while doing so) and Dynamic Braking... using the motor as a braking system... to stop it rapidly.
The soft-start feature speaks for itself in terms of electrical consumption. If the machine has a very high operating inertia, and takes a minute to get up to speed, you program the VFD to go from start to full speed in 1 minute... and it'll do it to faster, and use a small fraction of the current while doing so. This may not seem very impressive, but the side effect is, that if you have a 5hp motor driving a high-inertia machine, and you never make more than a 2hp cut, you can start-and-run your 5hp machine off a 2hp electrical service. A 120v/20A receptacle is 2400w... which is 3.2hp. Next... while doing so, the VFD is a motor controller- it monitors the motor status, and will operate as an overload protection system.
Next... dynamic braking. Most VFDs have external terminals for a braking resistor. In the programming, is a dynamic braking function... such that when you set the VFD to STOP, the motor becomes a generator, and the VFD directs the motor's energy into the braking resistors. By doing so, it stops the machine rapidly, smoothly, and best yet... saves wear-and-tear on the machine's mechanical braking surfaces. I have this set up in high-caliber mode on my Johannsen radial drill... with a footswitch to control the motor, so if my hands are working with spindle and workpiece, I can step on the pedal to start the spindle, remove my foot to stop it, and (since the spindle is low-inertia) it stops right-danged-now. Same for my Bridgeport mill. Eventually, I'll have a VFD on my table-saw... because table saws give me a serious case'a the willies...
By the way... the relief in the floor... could it be that they designed it with the intention of an in-floor conveyor or chute for the recovery of sawing spoils? If it were me, in the twenties, I'd probably build the whole building around the concept of handling raw materials in, with product out one way, and waste another... perhaps even send the sawdust waste to a boiler as fuel...