Maybe it's me but some of the things in this articles make me question their reporting.
What makes sense to me is that they have been involved with some shady crypto companies and they have been opaque about their goals, with some of the developers disagreeing with the CEO every now and again.
What rubs me the wrong way is the focus on his own political viewpoint (this is holy irrelevant to the software), his involvement with FTX (almost no one saw the collapse coming. It was one of only a few crypto companies that people didn't expect to be that shady) and getting a cease and desist from a newspaper corporation (this is much expected and frankly idk if the cease and desist even holds up. This is not as shady as the article makes it out to be and legally this is not cotton dry at all iirc. IANAL tho ofc)
I agree it's not the best idea to mindlessly go on using Brave, but honestly this article is really not that good.
Agreed, to actually convince anyone who uses it to switch over to another one I would have liked to see an objective comparison of how solid the privacy features are on both browsers, that's the only relevant argument that matters to anyone regardless of their ethical beliefs, here the only thing that tarnished Brave's reputation for privacy was the injected affiliate URL parameters, that's pretty bad, but it has also been fixed since, doesn't mean we can blindly trust Brave now, but it's not as bad as it is made out to be. To make a counterpoint, I think it's good that there is a privacy focused Chromium browser, because they can take a stance against proposed Chromium changes, like the handicapped ad blockers under manifest v3 or the most recent WEI, Chrome still goes ahead and implements those, but Brave remains and keeps their Chromium saner.
Personally I barely use it, but for what I have seen it has its ups and downs, if we also bring who's behind the product into the picture then even Mozilla hasn't always done good and good alone