It's like de-Googled Chrome, as it's based on the same Open Source Chromium browser, has all of the ad-blocking and anti-fingerprint tools built in, and all of the Google taken out.
You can also run popular browser extensions published for Chrome, but you don't need to worry about ad blocking, as Brave has you covered by default.
It also blocks YouTube ads effectively, by default. There's nothing you have to do to make this work.
They have also in the past been caught adding their own referral codes to crypto transaction URLs pasted into their browser. [2]
[1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-earn-and-use-cryptocurre... [2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/brave-browser-caught-redirecting-...
Aa of right now Brave has two "features" that you can disable - the crypto thing and a vpn advert. Once those are off, they are off. You don't see them anymore, they aren't sitting in the background running, and they aren't calling home.
It's no different to Mozilla's constant and blatant attempts to reactivate telemetry data in Firefox updates despite opting out - I'd argue that's a bigger offence.
I did their ads, I made hundreds of dollars leaving them on in the early days. I value my attention more so I've shut them off.