Basically, Google has made their search engine results purposefully worse, so that users need to keep scrolling to find the correct search results, while they feed more ads to users.
I don't think I've had their VPN installed (I use FF, Librewolf and Mullvad 99.99% of the time), but I do have Brave installed as a 4th option and have only used it a few times, so I'd like to make sure their VPN wasn't installed at some point.
In Services, I only see three Brave entries. Two are for keeping it up to date, and the other provides elevated privileges.