But what if I'm not interested in these particular digital tokens out of the pool of thousands? I get they have a dollar value associated with them, but I don't want them. I want exactly 0 of them. I want 0 pretend cash tokens of any kind. Why would the browser vendor get to decide this on my behalf?

I prefer not paying for content, which includes micro-transactions. I don't think I'm alone on that sentiment. If publishers won't get enough "BAT" through micro-transactions, the content will end up behind a paywall.