How though...?

I made this handy-dandy image to try and explain this better

Recreated it from memory from a dev stream a long, long time ago. Basically the hatchet hitbox is a sphere around the model, leading to the Huntress not actually needing to "hit" you. Even on her screen. This is accentuated further by the survivor hitboxes also having empty space on their hitbox where the hatcher can hit you. Making the hatchet explode in the air next you and cause damage (this can even happen from the Huntress' POV). However, this can also work against her making shots that should have gone over a wall or between a gap explode on nothing.

This leads to hits where you think "how the ######### did that even hit me?".

But then we add latency into the mix. And now you're getting hits round corners and all sort of dumb crap. Game wasn't designed with projectile killers in mind, Huntress really shows that. Slinger doesn't really have a problem with this due the speed and small size of his projectile. Plague is another victim, with her vomit phasing through survivors even at sub 40ms. I've had it happen to me on both sides.

Whoops got front and side messed up oh well.

Edit: And I'd like to add in the devs defense that at one point for a short time they DID make the hitbox 1:1. However Huntress became nigh unplayable due to survivor hitboxes not being accurate to animations. Leading to thing like hatchets going through the heads/shoulders of survivors mid vault and such.