In addition there's another deeper reason for the specific structure of Minkowski space as a affine manifold with a fundamental form of signature (1,3) or equivalently (3,1).
You can derive the Lorentz transformation by just assuming the invariance of physics under change of the inertial reference frame + the assumption that any inertial observer considers "his space" as a 3D Euclidean affine manifold (with all it's symmetries, i.e., translations and rotations, forming the group ISO(3)).
Then an analysis of the possible transformation laws leads to three possible structures for the homogeneous transformations (i.e., those without translations, generated by the boosts and rotations):
(a) SO(4) -> Euclidean Spacetime
(b) Galilei group -> Galilei-Newtonian spacetime (a fiber bundle)
(c) ##\mathrm{SO}(1,3)^{\uparrow}## -> Minkowski spacetime
Now in addition one of the most fundamental properties any spacetime model must have is to allow to define a "causal structure", i.e., the "causal direction of time". This excludes (a), because in this case noting fixes in any way the temporal order for all inertial reference frames, and this excludes a unique definition of causal order in accordance with the special principle of relativity. So a Euclidean spacetime model has to be excluded.
(b) of course works fine. In Galilei-Newton spacetime time is absolute and thus simply defining it as a oriented 1D manifold fixes the causal direction of time once and for all inertial reference frames
(c) of coarse also works with the usual caveat that there's a "limiting speed", and only "time-like" or "light-like" connected events can be in a cause-effect relation, which then is independent on the choice of the inertial reference frame. To the best of our empirical knowledge the "limiting speed" is the phase velocity of (plane) electromagnetic waves (with an upper limit of the "photon mass" being ##10^{-18} \, \text{eV}##.
For more on this very illuminating derivation of the possible spacetime models having global inertial reference frames, see
V. Berzi and V. Gorini, Reciprocity Principle and the Lorentz Transformations, Jour. Math. Phys.
10, 1518 (1969),
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1665000