Don't they basically all do that?

Brave owns an ad company. They are absolutely tracking users.

These systems still only operate once you've opted into them, meaning if you just never enable brave ads or disable it, these systems won't reach you or have any of these possible problems. Personally I don't use these browsers without disabling everything (ads, daily usage ping, ads on new tab page, etc) and once you've done that it is still a pretty great option for a privacy browser especially when considering its better web compatibility compared to Firefox which still lags behind.

**I am not saying Firefox or brave is definitely better than one or the other, I do not want to strike the hornets nest. **

IMO, if you disable all the aforementioned features, it is still good as a privacy focused browser. And especially if you disable things like ads and daily usage ping, you won't be contributing anything to brave devs at all and can use it just as a browser without supporting or enabling the words of their founder.

"Fake news" is the bat signal for "we're actually doing this"

Librewolf is the equivalent to brave just based on Firefox. (On android: Ironfox)

Maybe the right way in terms of privacy, but I find it all to be rather monopolistic. (Brave's ad replacement is infamous in this respect; they trashed it but blocking publisher ads and creating their own is pretty similar to their initial proposal).

I'm also not totally sold on differential privacy because, as far as I know, it's still relatively experimental and not very battle-tested. I remember Mozilla saying something to the effect of anonynization only working if a large pool of users commit to their tests.

any names?

Pretty much any web client I'd say.

I wouldn't say that, these people that use fake news are the ones that push fake news. Every accusation is a confession, we shouldn't get into the habit of reflexively rejecting everything monied interests project onto others unfairly. It's a big problem, and it leads to a loss of credibility to not recognize the harms in something, or the wrongdoing, because it's used cynically by a group trying to make it worse.

Ie, voting. The ones trying to cheat are accusing the ones not cheating of cheating. Do we defend all elections as fair because they projected that onto us, when they are cheating? According to the democratic establishment, yes. We are doomed to the republic being dead already and replaced with an unthinkable autocracy run by the worst people in the country if we continue to follow the lead of that establishment of democrats in being the opposition in fact. But I digress there.

We should turn their words and projections against them, with their own terms, with our own populists, real populists that channel anger towards it's source, rather than the fake populism of the right that misdirects it. It's the only way in fact, we could take a large part of the republican base, enough to overcome the cheating the republicans are planning on doing, in the succession fight, with a popular platform, that is aggressive, and turns their projections back on them, fake news, voter fraud, captured federal agencies, you name it.

This is why I switched to LibreWolf

Wouldn't a truly anonymizing web browser be flagged down by all Cloudflare protected websites?