Oh, that's clever. It's not just hiding the payload in the Exif, it's hiding the fact that the payload came from the network at all, by reading it from the browser cache (presumably after embedding the image into a page the user visited).
So you have a package that doesn't include (directly) malicious code or make network calls, yet it can still run malicious code from the network. This is much better than simple obfuscation because you can vary the payload, like a command-and-control server.
More than that; the trigger code can sit passively and just check the cache for whatever payloads may come its way.
I suppose image sanitizers come soon to browsers. Only sanitized images will be cached; anything the browser can't make sense of will be thrown away.