Why Is Winjs Included Automatically When Targeting Windows 8 In Cordova?

We're developing an app using AngularJS, and when we're targeting Windows 8 I noticed that the generated Visual Studio project included WinJS as a reference. Since we're not using

Solution 1:

cordova (and some cordova plugins, particularly the FileSystem plugin) use some features of WinJS, such as Promises and Ajax calls. We ended up forking cordova.js and stripping out all the WinJS stuff... makes the app load a lot faster!