> But, yes, toki pona lifts this to a whole 'nother level. Does anyone
> happen to know how Esperanto compares? As far as I know, it should be
> quite similar to a "normal" (non-con)language in this regard (just simpler
> to learn, with bonus points if you speak a romance language afaik)

As an Esperanto-speaker with a shallow understanding of Toki Pona I can say the
following comparison:

1. Esperanto has way more vocabulary, which is useful for translating nuances from one source language to another language and back. This was added over the years and is still expanding, as any other living language does.

2. Esperanto words are way more specific than the one of Toki Pona. A sentence which I took from a Toki Pona cheatsheet "soweli li moku" can be translated as "a land animal is eating", "a cat is drinking", "a dog is ingesting", etc. so highly context depending. Esperanto would for the specific meaning of "a cat is eating" allow "kato estas manĝanta" or, if you don't care for the present progressive tense, which is normally how people speak it, "kato manĝas" (present tense).

3. Toki Pona glues words together by putting them each after the other, without glueing the roots together. "telo pimeja" was one example of trying to say "coffee". The Esperanto principle would be to say nigroakvo (a kind of water, which is black). Besides that Esperanto allows more nuanced distinctions like adjectives, so "nigra akvo" would mean "black water", the water, which is black.
Also as I wrote earlier, the roots in Esperanto are way more specific. "akvo" is in Epseranto just water, not liquid, not fluid, not beverage as is the meaning of "telo" is in Toki Pona. Also "nigra" is in Esperanto "black", not dark, not unlit, as is the meaning of "pimeja" is in Toki Pona. Besides that was just an example based on the word coffee, which someone else in this topic used. The actual word of "coffee" in Esperanto is "kafo" and for tea is "teo", because words which are sufficiently internationally understood are put into the language by the speakers of it.

4. Esperanto is simpler to learn, it provides the same high rewarding learning curve as does Toki Pona, but it's steeper, because it's a bigger language. Depending on intelligence, learning style, being able to focus on things regularly, motivation, connections to other speakers, time I would say people can use the language after 3 months to one year. How good that is, that's another question. I learnt the language more intensively in the first year and then just maintained it, used it and improved upon it.

5. Esperanto uses an agglutination based way of building words, as I wrote in the example of point 3, based on my little understanding of linguistic terms, this could be called "synthesizing" words, but it also supports building phrases as does Toki Pona in an analytical way. "Ĉu mi povas uzi la lazertranĉilon?" (Can I use the lasercutter?) or "Ĉu mi povas uzi la ilo kiu tranĉas per lazero?" (Can I use the machine, which cuts with a lazer?). Toki Pona would be something like "mi li pali ala pali e suno ilo" (Can I use the sun-tool?). "ilo" by the way is a word taken from Esperanto, as the creator of Toki Pona also understood Esperanto, which means "tool".

6. Esperanto has 136 years of literature behind it, Toki Pona doesn't. Let's wait another 136 years and see which of all the current constructed languages are then still around and see how much is produced in them.

7. When you learn Esperanto you have acquired some shared vocabulary in romance languages, but also a little bit of other languages in the mix, like German. Which can be a little bit helpful when learning after Esperanto then those languages. Or trying to navigate on a trip through Italy, you won't understand 80% of what people are saying, but here and there you will encounter words, which sound familiar. Which shows the so called "eurocentricity" of Esperanto, which is then used by some to campaign against the language, as if that property makes it the ultimate evil in the world, if they would apply the same standard to speaking English, then they would stop writing in the internet at all.

8. Toki Pona is overhyped. Esperanto is not hyped anymore. Any long existing constructed language loses it's appeal at some point, because the times have changed, people don't understand the history of it, believe anything which at first sounds enough plausible, but is in fact bullshit. Worldwide auxiliary languages like Esperanto always have the problem to be not "perfect" enough, they all replace each other in an eternal asymptomatic drive towards "more perfection", without ever reaching that goal. Thus in the end the most working language in that category is still Esperanto and hopefully will be for the next 136 years. But that's only my personal pet opinion.

Anyway, as I'm digressing into some general rant about planned languages, I end this comment, I can surely answer concrete questions about comparing these two languages later on, if wanted.