This is the expected behavior - technically you can't import saved objects from a more recent version into an older version. This is the case because newer versions might have changed the internal format (or even added new features) and the old Kibana has no way of knowing how to handle them.
Manually editing the file by changing the migration version works in this case because there were no breaking format changes in 7.8, but it won't work in all cases and is not supported for this reason.
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