He's not sticking up for it. He's pointing out a truth. For example, in countries like the UK, as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent. Brave in this example would be forcefully removing the ability for me to get the consent that I legally require.
I don't believe in consent banners but that doesn't remove my legal requirements. I've got to stick to the law whether I like it or not.
> as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent
Consent !== cookie-banners. Hey, you don't have a legal requirement to track people at all; it follows that there's no legal requirement to get consent to track. Tracking must be opt-in, so just provide a menu option or something, that lets your visitor opt-in to tracking, if they love being tracked (let us know how many people opt-in to tracking, if you haven't gated the entire site on a consent banner).
Maybe your site provides features that depend on tracking? No prob - gate those features with a consent dialog.
Maybe you don't want any visitors you can't track? Well, that really means that your homepage should be an opt-in dialog, returning a 404 if you opt out.
Brave is giving users the ability to automatically say no to your cookie banners. People who use Brave don't want to be tracked and will never consent to it.
You're making a mass assumption based on your usage of Brave there. Most people I know who downloaded Brave (general people, not the YCombintor/tech power user types) initially got Brave purely because they wanted to earn tokens while browsing.
They don't care about the tracking/ad blocking side of things.
Which is funny considering that Brave is a for profit company and nearly all of their money comes from displaying ads. It's popular for blocking a thing that the company needs to survive, while not caring about all the websites they block ads on.
I don't believe in consent banners but that doesn't remove my legal requirements. I've got to stick to the law whether I like it or not.