> So that's how it works today on the release version with a magic "--<space> > all the stuff to pass down" at the end of the cordova cli command?
Yes, since this commit <https://github.com/apache/cordova-cli/commit/b5b4a14a2f8bdf43fcf098884ea70af109d596a2> (included in the currently released version) everything that comes after the bare double dash (--<space>) is passed along to the platform scripts. The place in code that splits out those args is here <https://github.com/apache/cordova-cli/blob/master/src/cli.js#L127>. The affected commands are: emulate, build, compile, run.
