https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess