Because SHA256 is fast to compute. This means that an attacker can quickly try many passwords, either from a dictionary of common passwords or simply brute forc

Because SHA256 is fast to compute. This means that an attacker can quickly try many passwords, either from a dictionary of common passwords or simply brute forcing a short password. Also, if you use SHA256 bare without salt you are vulnerable to precomputed dictionaries. There is a fascinating way to make these dictionaries shorter called Rainbow Tables. Better key derivation functions take a lot of time and memory to make it costly for the attacker to a lot of guesses at the password and they have built in salt. Examples would be SCrypt or Argon2.