How is Brave shady? Or are you just trolling?
1. The developers try to make up a reason to create another coin for something, that doesn't need a coin; 2. The relationship between the browser and the coin is not cryptographically strong and will never be — it's impossible to prevent fraud when their system is just a program that checks for certain condition (an ad viewed) and communicates to its backend, instructing it to give some address a coin. 3. The developers created a billion of tokens out of thin air and now try to give it some value. And traders do believe that it has some value.
I personally don't tolerate shitcoins even the slightest. Thus, I see Brave as nothing, but a browser engine with a content filter and a shitcoin embedded.
You can also easily enable and disable Brave Ads while still contributing (though you'd need to fund your browser wallet)
However, to me Brave is the least-worse browser because at least it has a step inside the territory of blockchain-based browsing. It's the first browser that will add an integrated wallet by default (mainstream will never accept using the weird developer-centric MetaMask extension).
For a while they would take BAT "donations" for any website, and would just keep them unless the site owner signed up to receive them. This stopped a few months ago.
The whole monetization model of replacing a site's ads with their own is questionable.
The whole BAT thing seems like a scam, they offer ways to buy them but no way to sell them.
Really anything that uses a cryptocurrency for funding has that "con stink".
Just to be more concise, they are not exactly "replacing" ads on the site. The built-in adblocker remove all ads irrelevant of the sites and if you enable Brave Ads (the coin thing, opt in), you get up to 5 per hour (configurable) OS native notification. The notification contains a text ad with a link. Even if you don't click on the notification, you get the coin.