Yes, brave is not a "hard fork" in the sense that it tracks upstream rather than diverged from it at some point in time. The difference is that they can try an

Yes, brave is not a "hard fork" in the sense that it tracks upstream rather than diverged from it at some point in time. The difference is that they can try and add and remove bits on each rebase, but ultimately it's beholden to the long term choices of the chromium project. Substantially diverging while tracking upstream incurs too much work on each rebase; Abandoning upstream to accommodate substantial divergence also incurs too much work due to taking on independent maintenance that increases the more the projects diverge... so as I said no one with substantial resources and a good reason would attempt to hard fork chromium.