Honestly I agree, quite sad to see such hostility to a relatively harmless technology, although Brave's implementation is a bit meh. I like the idea as a concept, to have websites and content creators to have a source of income without compromising privacy, but using BAT as the median currency kinda sucks. I'd have much rather Brave have chosen a more mainline currency. Thankfully by default, it isn't even used, only icons/new-tab-page are there to activate/use it.. having it be an opt-out solution would have soured me more. Default is essentially advertising its use, the 'disabling' is just hiding the references, which I do ofc.

That said, I don't care enough about this to take action. I still use it as my secondary for Firefox. I do actually use the brave search though, even on Firefox, as it seems to be better than DDG these days. Also not based/reliant on Bing.