You are assuming that Brave user base is only made of people who want a few tokens.
And that's probably the reason the majority is using brave.
There is no other sane reason to use brave instead of e.g. firefox.
Being advertised even on this forum as a privacy oriented browser... allow me to disagree on this. (at least until this last straw / change)
I tend to believe that it's not only those pennies that were seen as attractive, especially after they started asking for KYC.
(However, now I don't see another alternative than Firefox.)
I was using it because of its in built adblocker
You chose a browser based on an ability which every other browser has an addon for ?
Does brave also block every javascript until you allow it? There are addons for that as well.
I've lost contact with Firefox long before ad blockers were made for Firefox. And it was not the only thing I liked more on Chromium. Even now the rendering (from load up to the look and feel, even for the same fonts) is better on Chromium. And I also tend to believe that an in-built ad blocker should be better, smoother, faster. So yeah, surprisingly.
About javascript, yes it does:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/9j1rgw/block_scripts/e6onpx6/And of course, you can make per-website settings too in both directions.