Honestly, I think it is just a trend. It started with the iOS settings UI, everybody copied it and is still copying it almost 15 years later. Look at the settin

Honestly, I think it is just a trend. It started with the iOS settings UI, everybody copied it and is still copying it almost 15 years later. Look at the settings in Windows, Android, macOS (Ventura), Gnome. List/Detail view, and the detail pane is itself a list of mostly switches. One downside is as you mentioned the confusion whether it is on or off (although nowadays most UIs make it double clear with color and some with additional text). But also because the switch is on the right hand side, it is further away from the text, and is visually inconsistent with radio boxes. And it is part of this "iOS settings" design language which itself is problematic, because it doesn't try to have specialized panes for each setting but crams everything into lists. (This is not the fault of the toggle, but how it is used.) One point in defense of the toggle is maybe that it is not clear to everybody that you can usually click the text on a checkbox, making the click target rather small. But you generally can't click the text on a toggle, so it is moot.