What would you define as "Brave's 'bad stuff'" ? It would seem that Brave does a lot to leave power of choice while erroring on safety / privacy for the defaults. What issues does it have?
Ultimately they're inserting themselves in as the attention reseller - it's still an engagement/ad play dressed up a bit.
I really like what they've built, but I don't like how they're trying to monetize it. I think the ad/attention model is a corrupting influence on content quality generally, I can see what they're trying to do but I'd rather ad supported models just die. A browser completely focused on the user would just block ads and be done with it (imo).
Just let me pay for software that doesn't suck so our incentives are aligned. If you want a free ad-supported version for people unwilling to pay then fine.