> Cars that are designed from the ground up to be EVs tend to be much better

Better here means more efficient, cheaper to assemble, more spacious on the inside, etc. Having to repurpose space left when you remove the combustion engine + fuel systems and other supporting infrastructure to host an electric drive train plus battery typically means compromising on these things. It works but it won't be as good as it could be.

And of course in a market full of competitively priced EVs from vendors that designed them from the ground up to be pure EVs that means fighting with your hands tied behind your back.

This thing will probably still do alright for Toyota. But they'll have to discount it to compensate for it just not being all that great compared to its more optimized competition.

Toyota is very good at selling things at a bargain though. They are actually holding up pretty well compared to other legacy manufacturers (they even managed a bit of growth last year in units sold). But it's in a market that except for EVs isn't growing much where the Chinese manufacturers are expanding their market share globally at the cost of pretty much everyone else. Toyota is kicking the can a bit down the road here. Probably to buy some time to build something better in a few years. But they might be milking this platform for quite some time.