Does brave still do the purchase referral code swap thing?
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
The controversy came when it was found out they were inserting their own affiliate code into links. That's scummy.
Privacy violations - https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/nxce6t/brav...
Bundling crapware
https://community.brave.com/t/brave-has-become-malware/51041...
Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.
More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.
Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.