To me, Brave's value is due to its ad blocker. If they start shoving native ads into the browser then I'll uninstall it.
The set of technical users out there who will do anything and everything to avoid and block ads is not a valuable advertising space in any way, shape, or form.
The current tech already does that just fine, no need to have an ad network built into the browser that just overwrites existing ad networks on the page. At that point, it's no different than spyware/malware.
Is Brave showing any signs of becoming popular? Even within the bitcoin community where it would be expected to be most popular I only occasionally see people say they use it some of the time.
If.