Brave has been hyped as a privacy browser despite having several major privacy failures baked into it repeatedly. It’s 100% hype. You get the same level of privacy on paper by installing Chromium with an ad blocker and tweaking a couple settings. Firefox has better privacy defaults and is better with an ad blocker installed. Chromium has a slight edge on security (FF needs to really push tab isolation harder) but if privacy is your main concern I would always recommend FF.
Money is involved because people want to make a living off of their project. Also, every major browser has been backed with huge amounts of funding because supporting a browser is very difficult.
That said, that doesn’t mean every browser project is good, either. Just that it’s reasonable to see why people would want to get income from their work.
PS the Brave CEO sucks so I’m not sympathizing with him here.
Cult behavior