Media Library Custom Location / stop redirect of media items

I have a custom location for my media library, so that it’s located here:
/assets/
instead of here:
/wp-content/uploads/

Certain download links to files located in /assets/ are being redirected to the current language causing an error since the file doesn’t exist
(e.g. download link changed to /es/assets/mydownload.dwg when it should stay as /assets/mydownload.dwg)

Is it possible to stop items in the media library from redirecting? I tried putting in a URL exclusion for /assets/ but that doesn’t help.

I wanted to note that PDFs seem to work correctly, but I have a number of other file extensions that do not.