... and that inserts its own spam: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027

Can you back that statement up. You're saying that Brave inserts spam content in to pages? Do you have examples?

Never seen that myself in my time using Brave.

FWIW I quite like the BAT and affiliate link model and was made aware of both prior to my install.

That's not spam and I personally don't even have an issue with it

Noted, and bad, but I don't consider altering links to be "inserting spam".

to be fair, affiliate codes don't spike the CPU

When you fire up the Brave browser, it pings Google's servers and starts collecting your data. google doesnt give away multimillion dollar software applications without the ability to capture data with them.