You're probably correct about it being hard to make a decent iOS app in Swift Playgrounds, but it's definitely not a toy
I use it for work several times per week. I often want to test out some Swift API, or build something in SwiftUI, and for some reason it's way faster to tap it out on my iPad in Swift Playgrounds than to create a new project or playground in Xcode on my Mac — even when I'm sitting directly in front of my Mac
The iPad just doesn't have the clutter of windows and communication open like my mac does that makes it hard to focus on resolving one particular idea
I have so many playground files on my iPad, a quick glance at my project list: interactive gesture-driven animations, testing out time and date logic, rendering perceptual gradients, checking baseline alignment in SF Symbols, messing with NSFilePresenter, mocking out a UI design, animated text transitions, etc