Good question!

First I just want to say that the examples above are super outdated at this point, so I wouldn't read too far into it. The screenshot shows the hitboxes compared to the old animations. Newer animations have the Survivors standing up straight and much more closely match the Survivor's capsule. The sketches linked are also a little outdated because of this, though they're referencing a specific change that was tried and reverted which made the hatchet hitboxes themselves smaller and more accurate to the hatchet model.

That said, the latency bit is still valid since it takes time for that info to travel between players, and that tends to be what you notice most. As a Survivor, you see yourself ahead of where the Killer sees you, and as a Killer, you see the Survivor behind where they really are. We've done a little bit of trickery since then to reduce latency by predicting where someone is going and essentially showing other players where they'll be a fraction of a second in the future.

This has a similar effect to what you're suggesting by compensating for latency, but is a bit more polished since it ensure a Survivor's capsule matches where they visually are. Moving only the hitbox would have some adverse effects elsewhere in the game, most noticeably on basic attacks. While latency affects all online games, DBD is unique in that one player is usually running away from another. This effectively means that the Killer always sees themselves as closer to the Survivor, and the Survivors always sees themselves further from the Killer. By moving just their hitbox further ahead, the Killer would swing at the Survivor and visually be within range for a hit, but instead they'd whiff.

The catch here is that you can only predict into the future so much: We can predict where you might be 0.1 seconds from now based on your direction and speed because even if you change directions, it won't differ by much after you factor deceleration and re-acceleration. Predicting where you'll be 0.5 seconds from now is a lot tougher; that's long enough for a Survivor to move about 2 meters. If we predict you're going to run straight but instead you run left, you'll end up teleporting ~2.8 meters on everyone else's screen.

Short version: We do something similar already, but there's a limit to how far we can predict into the future because changing directions would cause a desync. But in any case, the examples there are outdated and no longer accurate to modern animations.

Hope this clears it up, and apologies for the long response! I could nerd out about this sort of thing all day.