Both hits per second and throughput are talking about workload, the hits are the request send from the injector over time, meanwhile the throughput is the load that the system is able to handle, both graphs should look the same as long as the application haven't reach its breaking point, after the breaking point the hits will continue increasing triggering a response times increase.
A test in which you note the difference is the peak test (you increase load until you crash the application), when the application exceeds its throughput the 2 plots will diverge.

As you can see the blue curve differ from from the green one after 650RPS, then response times skyrocket and request start failing.
- If we let the test continue running, the injector will run out of threads and the hits curve will be the same as the throughput again. Configuring the injectors pool thread.
- The area in between the two curves are active request, request that the injector sent and are waiting to be processed.
- The hits plot is measured in RPS, it is counting requests not transactions.
- The same plot can be generate using the jmeter's composite graph.