May be tone down your paranoia bit, once I disabled brave rewards, which was offered as a part of installation without any dark pattern I never saw any shilling.
Also what’s wrong with premium search? You expect free things which cost a lot of money, but you must not see Ads?
And Tor themselves wouldn’t recommend any other browser. Tor feature in brave doesn’t seem to be intended for super serious, but a safer VPN like alternative instead of say Express or Nord.
Even that is optional. You are never forced to use any of these features.
I don’t understand the sentiment of everything must be free and open source, when your daily life is not.
At least on Yc backed HN, I wish I see people supporting alternate business models. If it works for them good, else market speaks.
Problem is that "free" is our only option. I would love to pay for search engine that has more configuration options and no ads, I would love to pay for a modern browser (engine) without any tracking and no ads. Reality is that I cannot do that.
Reality is apart from few hundreds may be users, no one wants to pay for stuff.
WhatsApp costed a very nominal amount, No body in India cared until it became entirely free. So much that they favoured it over Indian grown app Hike messenger , which was much better Ux wise.
So you must find a batch of users who are willing to pay, and hire/pay a chromium dev to maintain your code base, or some similar business model. Where the devs don’t expect to become rich based on the project, an their only goal is to maintain a ungoogled chromium. Expecting a corp to do that is a wrong way to look into it.
