@HailleyKent If you were the Sender of the envelope you can correct and remove unwanted Recipients or remove fields from a Recipient as long as that Recipient has not yet taken action on the envelope. If the envelope is fully completed or a specific Recipient has taken the action assigned to them they cannot be modified to remove those actions which would include them placing their initials.
Regarding how they got there, Check if there was any “autoplace” fields used which can use text in the document to assign fields to multiple locations. Check for collaboration and whether “changes require initials” was selected which means if Recipient A adds text on a field and then Recipient B changes that text, due to collaboration being enabled, then it may go back to Recipient A to initial if collaboration was set to require those initials. If you enabled collaboration on a field where 5 Recipients could be changing data then the initials could be quite pervasive.