HT Access File problem

I have a WP blog installed in the example.com/blog/ directory of my site. Today, I noticed that if visiting the non-www version of the example.com/blog/ page, it redirected to my “main” site’s home page at https://www.example.com? It didn’t do this on any other blog pages / posts – just the blog’s index page.

Anyway, after a little digging, it appeared that there was an additional htaccess file in my blog’s folder – not one I created. I deleted this and hey presto, the redirect to www works fine throughout the site.

A) Could this one error have impacted my site in Google? It was just the non-www version of the blog’s index page redirecting to my site’s main home page – everything else worked as it should.
B) Other than manually having to remind myself to check, is there anyway I can stop WordPress creating this extra htaccess file?

Just to confirm; I’ve completely deleted the htaccess file from the /blog (WordPress) directory. This file shows the following:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress