Do you really browse the web without an ad blocker? uBlock, Adblock, Ghostery etc. don't even try to compensate content creators. Calling Brave a bad actor is absurd.
Some of us aren't yet comfortable with blocking the easiest way for users to compensate creators, while still consuming said content.
Brave's cryptocurrency scheme gives the Brave owners a 30% cut of all profits.
I am not 100% in favor of Brave's monetization strategy, though I'm very glad they are trying something less common. If their overall execution was more to my liking, I would gladly pay them for the service. You have no business presuming to decide for other people what they find worthy of compensation.
Well not just any browser company, but a browser company that improves the status quo and convinces me that they deserve it. In this hypothetical, the answer to your question is "because they deserve it".
The revenue usually isn't moving from me as the consumer directly to the producer, rather it is provided by advertisers who are engaged in ever escalating tactics to increase their efficiency, with little regard for me and my privacy as a consumer. With adblocking, we have two sets of people: a smaller group who browse without benefiting the advertisers who compensate the producers, and a larger group who browse while being enablers to the user-hostile privacy violating tactics used by most advertisers.
Neither of these situations is truly desirable in the long term. I don't seen any ideal solutions, and I believe that any entity which can move us towards a new and better model might be deserving of compensation, regardless of where they sit in the stream of data.
It's my choice which browser I use, and if I decide to use one that pushes money in a certain direction to fund better browser software, then I don't see that anyone can really complain.