I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed this. I tweeted a designer about it a long time ago and never heard back. (I might have tweeted on the wrong days where their limit gets reached so they lose tweets).
One could reasonably interpret the rules as saying that since hiding only requires an action in combat, you can use this ability to hide in full darkness outside of combat. I don't really like that, because I'm not a fan of a firm line between combat/not combat.
But hiding in dim light seems to require a more creative interpretation to work, since dim light doesn't generally allow for hiding.