I think that it's shady too. I don't know much about Brave and don't want to know. To me a huge red flag is that Brave tries to push its Basic Attention Token (BAT). BAT is a token of low quality because of the following reasons.
1. The developers try to make up a reason to create another coin for something, that doesn't need a coin;
2. The relationship between the browser and the coin is not cryptographically strong and will never be — it's impossible to prevent fraud when their system is just a program that checks for certain condition (an ad viewed) and communicates to its backend, instructing it to give some address a coin.
3. The developers created a billion of tokens out of thin air and now try to give it some value. And traders do believe that it has some value.
I personally don't tolerate shitcoins even the slightest. Thus, I see Brave as nothing, but a browser engine with a content filter and a shitcoin embedded.
However, to me Brave is the least-worse browser because at least it has a step inside the territory of blockchain-based browsing. It's the first browser that will add an integrated wallet by default (mainstream will never accept using the weird developer-centric MetaMask extension).
I hoped at one point Brave would follow more of a patreon-like model - block ads on pages and give the site my money in exchange. Unfortunately they've gone for showing me different ads.
Brave does follow this patreon style model. There's a section in the Brave Rewards panel that mentions "Auto-contribute" which does what your describing.
You can also easily enable and disable Brave Ads while still contributing (though you'd need to fund your browser wallet)
It sounds like you have something against cryptocurrencies as a whole and not their tokenomics as to me it seems the reasons for creating your own token for this case is fairly clear.
For a while they would take BAT "donations" for any website, and would just keep them unless the site owner signed up to receive them. This stopped a few months ago.
The whole monetization model of replacing a site's ads with their own is questionable.
The whole BAT thing seems like a scam, they offer ways to buy them but no way to sell them.
Really anything that uses a cryptocurrency for funding has that "con stink".
"The whole monetization model of replacing a site's ads with their own is questionable."
Just to be more concise, they are not exactly "replacing" ads on the site. The built-in adblocker remove all ads irrelevant of the sites and if you enable Brave Ads (the coin thing, opt in), you get up to 5 per hour (configurable) OS native notification. The notification contains a text ad with a link. Even if you don't click on the notification, you get the coin.
You can sell BAT via any crypto exchange or website. Coinbase, Uphold, Binance, etc. You can even choose to have BAT automatically convert to USD, Euro, etc.
