Brave is considered a dubious brand for precisely the reasons you mentioned-- they’ve had some scandals in the past for adding features which would directly go against their stated goal of privacy, and depending on where you stand on the whole AI/Crypto debacle, Brave makes its stances very clear. Some people prefer to stray away for it for these reasons.
Yes, of course, it has to make money, but you wouldn’t want your car mechanic taking parts off of your vehicle so they can offer cheaper service. It was… odd, is all, but as you said, it was rectified.
It’s, also, just not as popular of as a Rallying Banner as Firefox is for browsers-- I would sooner go become a lighthouse recluse before I have to defend the Mozilla Corporation, but there’s not that many non-Chromium browsers, so Firefox it’ll continue to be. This isn’t as immediately visible in the search engine wars, even though a lot of them are using the same engines, just proxying or aggregating results.
Now, that said, just because a brand is sketchy doesn’t mean their product isn’t good, and Brave Search is a legitimately good search engine for general-purpose lookup. The conversation features make looking for answers in places like reddit a breeze, and as you mention, it’s independent now. However it struggles and chokes with non-english languages (I never get quite the searches I need in my native language) and its ability to find relevant images is not as refined as Google aggregators, so having a backup in hand is a constant.
It’s a solid daily driver, though, for all of its flaws. Meanwhile every time I use DDG it’s to search for another search engine.