One side anecdote: just last week there was someone on HN arguing that "younger people were less susceptible to manipulation because they've grown surrounded by ads", and he gave the example of "fake news" being targeted and passed around by older people.
Reading about how something "makes you feel" reminded me of that. It's like people don't care about what objectively affects them or even trying to keep a sense of perspective.
It doesn't matter that it makes ZERO sense for a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to risk their whole business by taking petty cash from donations or putting "fraudulent referral link" that could be discovered so easily.
It doesn't matter that Mozilla/Firefox depends on the dirty money from Google to do whatever they do, or that they shove "opt-out" products into their users and don't track back, and that their management is running the corporation to the ground.
It doesn't matter that Google is doing anything they can to make life hard for users of ad blockers, or that their "privacy features" protects their users from everyone but Google itself. It doesn't matter that Apple is only concerned about privacy as a selling point for their overpriced crap.
None of that matters... what matters is "how people feel about a story".
Is Brave perfect? No, of course not. If you browse /r/BATProject you will find me calling out them for selling out (they got a partnership with Solana , who paid handsomely to get integrated into the browser) instead of leveraging their user base to promote the decentralization with Ethereum. If they ever (deliberately) do anything against the users, then I'll be the first to join the opposition. But none of the things that people hold against them fits this bill. None of it is shady or unethical.
Anyway, once trust is broken it's hard to mend that. However sucky the experience is, it seems like I'll stick to Firefox for now.