A hashed password means that you have to implement the entire hashing mechanism to evaluate it that will take a huge amount of code compared to a single string compare.
The hash string value will also be detected by most common static analysis rules which look for hashes and strings that look like passwords in the code.
The beauty of this hack is that even if you are looking for hard coded credentials you are likely not to find them as that PW string will not trigger any reasonable regex which will look for a clear text passwords (or a hashed one for that matter).