Your last point is laughable.
Yes Brave cannot make commits to Chromium, but it makes changes to their own repos (well, obviously) and can also accept/reject changes Google makes to Chromium.
In my opinion, Firefox is more of a slave to Google than Brave will ever be because they rely entirely on Google giving them money for the default search engine.
Is Brave’s revenue model scammy? Maybe. But at least they aren’t Google little bitch.
The browser as is right now is open source and has way better defaults for privacy than Firefox (currently it seems it is the best browser in this aspect after librewolf. see: https://privacytests.org ).
In this case, I believe that the clients will be signed by the big companies (Apple, Google Microsoft, etc) and these signatures are what will be trusted.
For instance, if you download Chrome, it will be signed by Google. But if you try to alter it in anyway, the signature will not be valid and the website won’t trust you anymore.
I switched to the Poco F5 from my Mi Mix 2S. Overall I think it’s probably the best bang for buck in the category. If you know your way around MIUI’s shennanigans, it should be pretty great. The only complaint I have (it’s really small) is that I was used to tap the power button for shortcuts, but now that becomes weird because it always unlocks the phone.
They can do whatever they want, they only do it because Google allows it.
By that logic, Brave is also completely against Google because they block their ads and go against them.