Yeah Brave's business model always seemed incredibly scummy to me. For ad blocking arguments can be made both ways, but Brave's "let's replace them with our ads" model (I know it's opt-in) just seems like a way to hold site revenue hostage. Either join Brave's network or miss out.
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.
FF is my daily driver too, but since Google properties increasingly only work reliably in Chromium, I use Brave for those (without opting in to BAT, which doesn't appeal to me). It's not bad, works fine on Ubuntu, built-in adblocking (but you can install uBo etc.)
Vivaldi seems like the better Chromium wrapper to me. But my daily driver is Firefox.