IIRC this was made to solve a licensing issue with busybox (toybox being more permissive) and be included with Android. As a fan of copyleft, initially the idea annoyed me, but I eventually came to the conclusion that if it was the only way to include better tools in a particular OS out of the box, it was probably fine.

I recall busybox being often used for gpl enforcement, so I wonder now how widespread toybox is by various companies hoping to avoid that. Do modern Smart TVs and such use it?

See also, for Windows: w64devkit, and the included busybox-w32

https://github.com/skeeto/w64devkit

https://frippery.org/busybox/