Not quite. We had a couple domains that—when typed into the address bar—would offer a referral-option in the browser UI. If you quickly hit the enter key, you might mistakenly have selected one of those unintentionally. This was a UX bug on our end as the feature wasn't intended to match complete URLs.

The goal was to offer folks a means of supporting the development of a privacy-preserving browser, at no cost to them. We blogged about the feature at https://brave.com/blog/referral-codes-in-suggested-sites/, and ultimately disabled it by default. But there was never any "hijacking of links," or "swapping of affiliate codes".

The truth is less exciting, I know.

The back and forth with Eich on Twitter and him defending it as ethical when it was first reported on painted a different picture at the time for me: https://imgur.com/a/MotmTGh

When pushback increased, it seemed like it was addressed and then retroactively labeled a bug.

Your own dismissiveness of the issue on Twitter, including posting an image which didn't reflect the actual user experience in Brave stable at the time, left a similarly bad taste: https://imgur.com/a/x9smj6M

That was when I thought the attribute was added only when the user searched, but it was added even to a FQDN which should not have been done.

We didn't make anything from this bug, fixed it quickly, it's a black mark on our shield still but it wasn't some mustache-twirling grand plan, believe me. It was a blunder.