To add to my last response, I remember few years ago, though in all fairness, customer was not CP familiar at all, they knew Cisco very well and we had same issue as what you described and TAC person was on the phone and yea, it was very late, but thank God I did what they suggested in my lab first, because they mitakenly asked customer to delete some additional files and had they done so, it would have been a disaster, to put it bluntly.
But, I tested it in the lab, removed ONLY .elg files needed and it worked fine afterwards. Man, EVE-NG is so golden, youcan literally spin any fw in 5 mins.
Andy