Brave announced only 2 weeks ago that they would no longer default to Google search in their browser.
"Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser"
"Privacy-preserving Brave Search Replaces Google as the Default Search Engine in the Brave Browser"
The first part of my comment ignores the existence of Brave Search, saying that it's not "hard to avoid" Google Search when all it takes to do so is changing your browser to point to Bing.
The second part of my comment that references Brave search was a response to the question of whether brave search uses Google under the hood.