What does `echo -e "\x6F\x6B"` do?
Would be fun
Like do a +1 on the byte every 7 bytes. Bonus to do it only on every 7 printable chars.
And you can even do A/B testing on the constant 7.
If the only thing the command does is "obscure what it does", then the only thing it obscures is "obscure what it does". I guess there's no requirement that whoever writes these scripts is a genuis.
So often the first stage is an attempt at honeypot detection, or more broadly, device fingerprinting.
A bad honeypot might not even run a real /bin/sh, and this detects that right off the bat.