I personally do trust Brave as a company. I don't think they're perfect by any means, and I strongly disagree with and dislike their CEO, but overall I think their browser is the best Chromium option out there, and search engine is probably 2nd best to Kagi. I don't primarily use Brave's browser, I do mainly stick to and recommend hardened Firefox (as I dislike and am strongly against Chromium and it's monopoly), but for the rare times I run into a site that needs Chromium, I use Brave. I do also primarily use Brave's search engine because I think it's just currently the best option out there for search (Kagi is excellent overall but its paid and too expensive imo), and I love that Brave Search has its own index, so no reliance on big tech like Google and Microsoft, unlike other options like StartPage and DDG. I've never bothered with Brave's VPN.

I just think overall a lot of Brave as a company's controversies have been blown out of proportion and aren't as big of a deal as people make them out to be. Their browser is open source which means it can be fully audited, they have very strong privacy protections in place out of the box, and they're even recommended by trustworthy sources like Privacy Guides. Their browser and search engine is really solid from a technical standpoint, and I don't think that should be overlooked just because of a few fuck-ups as a company which were walked back and fixed.