The browser does have that feature -- you can sign up to pay content creators while not signing up for the ads.
While I do understand the problem with privacy/tracking, I don't understand the visceral dislike of ads. Ads allow for this fantastic thing that is the WWW where so many nice and useful content and services is available for free to most users who will not really shell out money for things they weren't looking for in the first place -- all financed by the companies that can afford to pay for the ads.
With Brave's ads, it sort of seems like you don't give up much in terms of privacy and tracking -- though yeah it's the start of a slippery slope, but hopefully down the road, if they sell their soul and do more tracking, there will be someone else who'll then provide a "free" service that does less tracking :-).