Many files inside pbit zipped directory (i.e. Connections, DataModelSchema, DiagramLayout, DiagramState, Metadata, Settings, Version, Report/Layout, Report/LinguisticSchema) are json files enconded with UTF-16 LE. This makes it difficult for versioning repos to diff them.

The Power BI desktop software needs those file to be encoded like this to work.

This way, it's a nice feature to convert those files to UTF-8 on pre-commit, and convert them back to UTF-16 LE on post-commit and post-checkout.