freehorse parent
For many reasons, one being that they were injecting urls with their affiliate codes to unsuspecting users.
This was in 2020. Brendan Eich addressed this in a blogpost iirc, with a perfectly plausible explanation. It seemed like a bad/unfortunate design decision, which happens all the time in software development and not the conspiracy theory people claimed it to be. It was fixed in a matter of days.
If this is the main reason to not use Brave then I'm genuinly interested in hearing about the other reasons. I might learn something I wasn't aware of.
I don't understand all the hate Brave gets either. It passes pretty much all privacy tests ootb and I see 0 ads, on desktop and mobile. This is what actually matters to me.
I don't think the past controversies were just unfortunate, "mistakes" or conspiracy theories, but products of their business model + opportunistic execution. I just don't trust brave and think I have better options for a browser. If I had to choose between brave and chrome, I would use brave. If you like/prefer using brave, honestly good for you.