That's the crazy thing about this. There's already obfuscation techniques against hash blacklists, so what is this even for? There's no earthly way apple security engineers didn't know that. So what is actually happening?

My guess is that it's strictly for banning app store apps that they pull from the app store, but would like also to cripple retroactively on installed machines. But that doesn't explain why it had to run against random shell scripts? This is all still confusing. We don't have all the info.

Which they already do.