I’d ask why they don’t make it optional (I’m not a Brave user) but it seems it was.

Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.

This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.

Given that, I’m inclined to agree with the decision to remove it. Pick your battles and live to fight another day.

They have said they want to keep a fairly long-term performance target for game devs optimizing for the device. Consoles do the same thing. Another part of that is improving margins over time.

KDE is working on it for Plasma 6.

They ask a bit of trust on that, but their FAQ also has an appeal to reason:

I have privacy concerns over linking my search queries with my credit card. Why should I trust you?

We do not log search queries. Queries you type are never associated with your account. The simple reason is we don’t have any reason to do so, as it would only be a liability for us. We are in the business of selling search results, not user data.

(For the record, I use Kagi)