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With md5 hashes, the actual password isn’t there whereas base64 encoding is merely another way of representing the same bits. Yes md5 is weak, but it’s Fort Knox compared to base64.

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I’m very much aware of the differences in format and effort. The idea was only tangentially related :/

Also, at the risk of being pedantic, yes, some semblance of the password is definitely there. Someone can happily go off and try to brute force it.

As long as we’re being pedantic, no they can’t (well, I guess they can try with no hope of succeeding?). You can find a sequence of bytes which will have the same md5, but you have no way of knowing that it’s the same string of bytes which someone else used to arrive at that md5. As I alluded to in my post, that information is gone.

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