Not sure why Brave gets attention on HN at all. Their sketchy business model was clear many years ago, see the intro post from 2016:
This is very persistent misinformation. Brave used to modify search results pages to insert their referal code, which was scummy as hell and thankfully they went back on that decision and pretended it was an accident (I can't see how that could possibly be done by accident.) Referall codes are not exactly 'ads' though, and other than that, Brave hasn't inserted their own shit into webpages. The ads which Brave displays are in a separate window, not inserted into web pages.
Anyway, just stick to Firefox. The perceived "need" to use a Chromium browser is a Google psyop. Firefox works fine, and if it takes a few minutes off my laptop's battery life.. who fucking cares. Not me.
They've since changed that model 15378382 times, every time denying that there was a problem with the previous versions, so I stopped caring.
I mean I get it: it's a very hard problem to fund a browser that is user-centric, and all solutions found as of today suck in one way or another. Mozilla does it by leveraging Google's need for a fig leaf when talking to authorities about monopolistic behavior. Vivaldi does it by selling pageview counts or something like that. Etc etc. I just wish companies were more honest about it.
For values of "insert into the ad chain"* that did NOT mean inserting ads into webpages. They never did that, it is persistent misinformation. I'm beginning to think it is deliberate misinformation.