strip-bom | Strip UTF-8 byte order mark from a string | Regex library

I included a lot of background information to help you answer this question, however you can skip down to the heading called 'Questions' to skip to the main point.

I'm new to using Cordova, and I'm new to an existing Cordova project I want to further develop. As a result, when I look at the project files, I am not sure what are choices made by the previous developers and what are choices made automatically by Cordova. I suspect that Cordova generates a lot of files that are not created by the application developers because in my case there are over 7900 files including source code and README's, and the application was previously (to my knowledge at least) developed by only one person.

While many questions could be asked from that perspective, I would like to narrow in on a specific question to avoid being too broad. I've noted that are many files within the path structure called index.js.