I use Brave browser & Brave Search and I find them both excellent. But, it clearly sounds like their profits have been coming from scraping the web and selling that to other AI companies, rather than advertising on their search engine (I almost never see ads on there despite have adblock off on that domain) or their browser products (VPN, their stupid Brave Rewards crypto which everyone should disable immediately, etc).
But, bare minimum they should have a useragent that people can opt out of through robots.txt. That's just basic etiquette. Beyond that, I'll wait for their response.