It seems to have more to do with the concatenation operator than the newline character. The . preceding the hash seems to force the hash into a scalar context. For example, try this:

print scalar %newHash;
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This also produces "2/8".

Also try this:

print "foo " . %newHash;
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This produces:

foo 2/8
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I'll admit that I do not understand the significance of the "2/8".