More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium,

More importantly: being a fork or not doesn't matter! As long as the Brave team is not able to write their own browser engine that could compete with chromium, they are stuck with whatever development goes into chromium. "Oh it's just patches and things", but it won't be forever, and we WILL see work go into chromium that is deep enough to be difficult to untangle and subtly designed to to force you into whatever path google wants. There will be a day where Brave is unable to degoogle chromium to a useful point. Participating in a chromium browser is only helping google, and there's no way around that.