True. Hive leaders also start younger, giving you effective extra lifetime.
But honestly, that's not even the main advantage of this combo IMO. Hives (uniquely among bio empires) start with significant pop assembly. This lets you immediately take advantage of the extra trait points from the bonus starting tech, and the ability to freely add and remove Overtuned traits, to rapidly begin specializing your species (just make sure you have the picks available) without Forced Growth penalty. Once you've assembled a pop of a new species, you can use them to colonize and rapidly start to outpopulate your original sub-par species, without needing to pay pop modification project costs.
Hives are also good at food production + have no CG need, letting you run Damn the Consequences more freely. The only ascensions they can access are the only ones that make any sense to combine with Overtuned, too, which isn't exactly a synergy but at least means you don't have to double-count the ascension-choice-restriction downside because they're the same.
This is one of relatively few builds since the pop growth curve change where you will still reliably reach the point of "legitimately takes effort to find jobs for all these pops" without fucking with the growth sliders. Some people hate that - it increases player burden - but it makes for stunningly powerful empires.
