Brave uses Chromium code, but it is not a Google product. And I believe you are conflating security and privacy. The Chromium codebase is in fact more secure than Firefox in many areas. There is only so much hardening you can do security-wise before you are limited by its codebase. From a privacy perspective, though, you can definitely make the argument against Google. Brave, however, removes/replaces most of the Google stuff.

Brave itself is not a Google product, but does heavily rely on an engine controlled by Google, which is unfortunate. This is a distinct difference though, there are things Google cannot force brave to do like chrome’s new found ability to send ads based on browsing history, and there are things brave can do that Google doesn’t want them to, like integrated advanced ad blocking.

Still though, Google controlling the browsing view experience for so many browsers is not great and I’m sure it won’t be long before they figure out how to do something we wouldn’t want them to that brave won’t be able to stop because of their reliance on chromium.