[wongarsu]

Yes, that's the common counter argument. Your hash has now just become the password, and no amount of clever salting really solves that.

It still prevents the server (and any proxies, MitM attackers, etc) from seeing the plain-text password, which can help protect the user if they reused the password somewhere else. Assuming the client wasn't also compromised, which is very likely in web applications but maybe a valid scenario in apps and desktop applications.

The other imho valid idea is that you can run a key derivation function client-side (e.g. salted with the user-name), in addition to running your normal best-practice setup server side. This can allow you to run more expensive key derivation which provides more protection if your database is leaked, while also making dictionary attacks on your authentication endpoints less viable.