Brave was never good: crypto-crap, based on Chromium, and was modifying web pages from the start without your consent. I never understood why people use it.
People use it because it is essentially Chrome with uBlock-Origin built in (I think the developer of uBlock Origin is employed by Brave) and it removes the stupid cookie modals that are on every website. Between running a pi-hole and Brave, I rarely see an advert on a website.
Turning off the "crypto-crap" can be done quite easily (you literally right click on the BAT icon and it is gone) and the new tab ads are removed again with a couple of clicks. I've found it also runs much better than Firefox on older hardware.
The first and last time I tried Brave, it was injecting links (with a pretty golden picture) in each post of reddit (and I'm not talking about changing the referrals). To turn that off I had to look deep into the settings.
