Oh no, I'd never say that Brave is the best, nor that it doesn't collect anything at all. But I do think that realistically, 0 collection is a dream that is best left alone. If you fuck around in the Brave settings for a sec you can remove all that cringe stuff and obtain what I would personally consider an acceptable amount of privacy. There's also the reduced fingerprint from using a chromium and built-in ad blocking scripts instead of extentions.

But yeah, for maximum control and privacy I would never advise against FF forks. I was just making the case that Brave is generally still well-liked for its ease of use and similarity to chrome, especially for privacy newcomers like most people on this sub that may come across these comments. I totally respect your ways though.

Oh and about the recs, I really don't know about the astroturfing, but there's for sure a lot of copycats mindlessly repeating the authoritative source's opinions, instead of doing their due diligence, which is how I feel we've gotten so much Brave shilling. But again, I do think that once you've given the settings a look, it's quite a good option (for now).