"The need funding from it somewhere" is the concerning part. Don't let desperate people run your browser. They already got caught injecting their own referral codes into links then just said "oh sorry."
I'm not here to claim that Brave is without issues. The whole crypto stuff is stupid. However, they have seemed to responsibly moved on from their previous failures, and that's okay with me. None of their previous failures intentionally attempted to affect user privacy or sell user data. That's what we are talking about here.
Brave is objectively better for user privacy than base Chromium. That is without question. If you disagree, please provide evidence to those claims.