And yet I just use Brave because it's a nice Chromium fork with actually useful built in anti-tracking tools and a focus on privacy that has been proven in detail by other people by simply sniffing network calls.

I don't use BAT (at least right now). I use Patreon which is a "rent seeker", or in other words someone providing a service for a fee for handling transactions without me having to physically go to the other person and give him money, and I find that very useful. So I don't see what the issue is with it even if I don't care about it.