Weird name choice, as one of more used homonyms that read as はく means "to vomit".
"Haku" is an unusual string in Anglophone culture, so it makes sense that people would mentally associate it strongly with the first (or most frequent, or most recent) meaning they encounter. For a native Japanese speaker, I imagine that it would be viewed as any common prefix or two-letter word would be in English — if not as even more generic, because Japanese seems to have so many more homophones than English (based on my very limited knowledge of the language).
Both of the reasons for the many homophones in Japanese are related to Chinese:
1. Japanese use both native Japanese words, like はく (ha-ku), and Chinese loanwords, like 白 (HAKU). Due to the very limited phonology of Japanese, these often coincide.
2. Again due to the limited phonology, a lot of sounds that in Chinese sounded different will coincide in Japanese.
By the way, HAKU and all other single character sounds that come from Chinese were originally single syllables, but since a syllable can't end in K in Japanese they add a U to it.
People might object that Mandarin also doesn't allow syllables that end in K, but the Chinese spoken when these words were borrowed did, just like Cantonese still does.
HAKU in Japanese is BAI in Mandarin and BAAK in Cantonese.
Mandarin really feels like a streamlined variant of Chinese, probably the classic lingua franca affliction. The tone system is also impoverished.
Hakka preserves some archaic features though, would be interesting to learn more about that.
Hakka retains the -m final, instead of merging it to -n. It retains distinct 'round' and 'sharp' (velar and dental) onsets in positions where some Mandarin varieties (including Standard) merge them to the new palatal j/q/x.
The Middle Chinese palatal ny- is lost in Hakka as it is almost everywhere. It merged with r- in Mandarin, y- in Yue, and ng- in Hakka. So you can't read the archaic form directly off any one of those varieties, but you can detect it by comparing any two.
Hakka tonal developments are middle-of-the-road. Like every variety of Chinese, it had the four Middle Chinese tones altered by the voicing feature of the syllable onset, and like every variety outside of Wu/Shanghainese, it then lost the voicing feature itself.
Hakka splits the ping/level tone in two by voicing, like almost every variety does. It splits the ru/entering 'tone' (the syllables with final stops) by voicing, like almost every non-Mandarin variety does, instead of disintegrating it like Mandarin.
In the shang/rising tone, Hakka agrees with Mandarin against Wu and Yue that you don't just split the tone down the middle by voicing; you split off voiced obstruent onsets and leave voiced sonorant onsets alone. It agrees with Mandarin and Wu against Yue that the split-off voiced onsets (whether all of them or just the obstruents) merge into the qu/departing tone.
Hakka agrees with Mandarin against almost everybody else that the qu/departing tone does not split.
The spoken language encodes hints in tones so homophones aren’t necessarily “homo” phones - Haku used as verb and as a name, or kuma as in bears and as in black spots under eyes, are pronounced slightly differently. If you listen really closely you might notice “ha” in Hali’s name is pronounced slightly stronger.
At the end of the readme the author says it’s partly from the male protagonist in Spirited away, who is also named Haku.
So if Ghibli can get away with it …