There's no agenda, just proper reasoning. Think about it in terms of Bayesian probability: it's a cryptocurrency product, and pretty much everything in the crypto space is a scam, so right off the bat when you hear about Brave, before you even know anything your prior probability that it's a scam is 95%. Then they got busted 'keeping the money' and not telling the creators, and the posterior jumps to 99.5%. I know they mostly fixed that, but at that point the trust was gone and it's not worth anyone's time to give a second chance.

It sucks, but at the same time, if you're going to be an honest actor in crypto, you better cross every t and dot every i, because bad actors are everywhere and so smart people just assume bad faith and are arguably correct to do so.

If your proper reasoning involves the premise: "it's a cryptocurrency product, and pretty much everything in the crypto space is a scam," you might want to adjust want you call "proper reasoning."

Sure! But one product doesn't adjust it very far. So next time I hear something is a "cryptocurrency product", instead of 95% scam alert I'll be at 93-94% scam alert.

What they had to fix was not "keeping the money", it was a bad UI that implied creators had accounts.

The reason that Brave doesn’t get a great rap around here is because it trips the sketchy detector. They make a marketing image of themselves as the protectors of privacy and whatnot and then the browser includes (or included) a lot of features that seem to go contrary to the stated mission.