For someone that hasn't used Brave in a while - what's the difference between Brave profiles and profiles in other Chromium browsers?

There may be other Chromium-based browsers which do this, but none that I use: on launch the user is (optionally) prompted with a profile selection tool, with additional options to create a new profile or go into a guest session. I appreciate this because without it I often end up wondering why something isn't behaving properly, and after a moment of confusion then realize I'm in the wrong profile.

It's not perfect, and I prefer Firefox's rules-driven containers, but for anything which requires Chrome I've found it sufficient.

Ah, that sounds nearly identical to the standard launch-time profile picker from the Chromium base - example from Chrome https://i.imgur.com/7b7YqUY.png

Sure is, thanks. At the time I settled on Brave for that use case I saw no such behavior from any of my other Chromium-based browsers. Either Brave upstreamed it, or I did something wrong on my end (likely).

Pretty sure the setting has been around for a while, possibly upstreamed from brave but I feel like it was around before then. It’s pretty hidden tho, and most ppl don’t want it and get confused why it even exists so it’s possible there isn’t great documentation on it.

In Firefox this prompt is invoked with "-P" argument.

Chrome itself has profiles, which I use for exactly the same use case (multiple AWS logins)

You're correct. It does, but the last time I tried it it does not prompt on launch as Brave can, which provides a nice reality check for my addled mind.

I dislike certain aspects of Brave for other reasons, but this is why I have an unholy number of browsers installed and end up making use of nearly all of them regularly, unfortunately.