Which is, to put it bluntly, a blatant cash-grab that tries to redirect whatever ad cash flow it could catch into their own pocket.

Best of all, their website puts Brave's selling point as 'not letting other browsers treat you as a product'. Yeah, fat chance.

update: a quick look later, nothing I could not have done using standard open source tools like HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger and/or uBlock Origin.

It is more like an attempt to just get hits for his site. Most of the user's activity is submitting links to his own site: https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=willhallonline

Yeah, I got that impression too