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I've generally seen this with Unix installers from commercial software vendors.

You get a giant .sh file that displays a license, asks you to accept, then upon acceptance, cats itself, pipes through head/tail, into cpio to extract the actual assets.

It’s clever but not entirely novel, this is kind of the intended usecase for these

The use of head/tail for deobfuscation also isn’t visible as plain text in the repository or release tarball, which makes searching for its use in other repositories more difficult (unless a less obfuscated version was tested elsewhere).

Opportunity to write a paper

Maybe some analysis of odd patterns in entropy of binary files committed to repositories could pick out some to look at a bit deeper?