In case the stream includes non-svg files as well (i.e. json files with meta data), there will be no use trying to parse these files with cheerio. Also, quite possibly the user will want to preserve these files for different purposes.
I've never encountered such use case in 4 years of this plugin. But, if you really want mixed files, you can use something like https://github.com/robrich/gulp-if to conditionally pipe svgs through.
In case the stream includes non-svg files as well (i.e. json files with meta data), there will be no use trying to parse these files with cheerio. Also, quite possibly the user will want to preserve these files for different purposes.