I thought Brave made very little sense when it was first launched. Who would want an ersatz Chrome browser? Now it's starting to look very smart. Sure, it's open source so anyone can fork Chromium. But it does take a lot of sophistication to do it properly and add back the usability bits in a nice way. And if you could basically have Chrome but without losing the ad blocking, that starts to sound pretty compelling.
Despite being made by that homophobe I will never financially support, you seem to be right. Unfortunately.
Brave funnily enough is also the only Chromium-based browser that lets you set policies to turn off their optional features, none of which I want.
Vivaldi has some downsides (no gesture navigation is a dealbreaker) and installs its bookmarks every time you sync a new browser. It also feels crowded no matter what settings you use.
Edge just does absolute asinine stuff. Yesterday it disabled my new tab page without asking (and it also asks every day) and today it asked if it could submit my Kagi search results to Microsoft to help them make Bing better, which I refused. Weirdly enough the refuse button was blue... and sure enough, Edge set my default search engine to Bing in that moment. Apparently you can switch to a non-consumer Windows SKU to turn down these shenanigans. An Antitrust needs to read that source code, badly.
Unfortunately I can't use Firefox because an app I'm forced to use wouldn't support it.
The world is ripe for a Chromium fork that just works. Maybe Ungoogled-Chromium can bring back some creature comforts eventually...
