I use Brave as a second browser (mainly to separate different activities) and did not have any issues with it apart from dragging tabs between monitors (it creates an additional empty tab sometimes when doing this). Turned off all unnecessary stuff right when I first launched it and that's it. No bloat, no issues, just works. Didn't know about this CEO controversy but seeing as it was a long time ago, don't think it's a valid reason to not use Brave. And both logo and name are cool.
It's a solid option which we don't really have a lot of in open source space
I mean, there's simply just Firefox. Which is apparently not the basis for Brave. It does sound like Brave collects data so it still seems shady.
Edit: could have sworn brave was built on Firefox. It's not. It's chromium. Which in my opinion counts against it as I'd rather avoid a monopoly considering how much control Google has over chromium and the inherent biases Google has.
You might have been thinking of Mullvad Browser, which is based on Firefox and came out somewhat recently. Other privacy-focused browsers based on Firefox include Librewolf and Tor browser.