I liked Brave well enough, but I switched to Firefox when I learned Google was going to force Manifest V3's adblock-gimp into Chromium. I figure it's a matter of time before Chromium-based browsers like Brave are forced to either adopt it or fork Chromium and maintain it themselves, and I know which of those two seems more likely to me.
Brave Shields block ads and trackers by default, and they’re built natively in the Brave browser—no extensions required. Since Shields are patched directly onto the open-source Chromium codebase, they don’t rely on MV2 or MV3.
Interesting, I never even knew Brave had that stuff built in, i switched from Chrome years ago and installing ublock origin had already just become the default thing I do to any browser first thing by that point. Though I will note this line in the link you provided:
For as long as we’re able (and assuming the cooperation of the extension authors), Brave will continue to support some privacy-relevant MV2 extensions—specifically AdGuard, NoScript, uBlock Origin, and uMatrix
Which suggests that they're planning to eventually be forced into Manifest V3 (or something similar) to gimp those extensions, but I s'pose I'll give it a shot without ublock and see how it goes. Firefox has given me trouble in a bunch of ways (not remembering per-page zoom, hotkeys changing on me unexpectedly, issues with reddit/lemmy on long posts, etc) and I wouldn't mind switching back.
Definitely have multiple browsers. IronFox is a great option. I use Brave as it simply works with the onboard filters and hardening. There are a few easy guides to walk through the settings changes that improve the picture.