Honestly, even the crypto part of Brave was a cool idea. Back when it was in beta, I was sending various websites and GitHub users 'tips', and they were able to cash out. It was genuinely supposed to be a new way to monetize the web (they later made the tips automatic based on how long you spent on each webpage), but, yeah.. Too many people didn't see the vision, and they got too much hate, so I'm pretty sure that whole program is axed now.

Used to use Brave, but it became more and more bloated as time went on. Also, I realized that I wasn't opposing Google as I wanted, but choosing an alternative of Google, as brave is still based on chromium. I enjoy Firefox very much now (don't know about the performance issues people talk about at all cause it seems better than all chrome, brave, opera, and opera GX I used in the past) although I'm looking into even further simplifying and privatizing that. Any suggestions for modified Firefox browsers that keep the functionality would be appreciated.

I used to use Firefox but have been using Brave cause I was getting tired of having to open Edge every time there would be an addon or tool that was Chrome exclusive. So unless there's other options for privacy focused chromium browsers I'm just gonna stick with brave.

What is the issue exactly with their search engine?

its open source tho, show me the spyware and i will belive you