If you use Mac then you can consider Orion by Kagi (natively built with WebKit) which supports both Chrome and Firefox extensions (experimental).

(I personally use Firefox since I feel it's a much better browser (especially thanks to Firefox Multi-Account Containers), so can't comment on quality since I just tested it briefly.. but I do use Orion as my main browser on iOS where it's amazing.)

I recently switched to Orion in my company Macbook (from firefox, which I use everywhere). It's good enough... but it's not great. I've had at least one site broken even in compatibility mode. I am very frustrated by poor mouse support: unable to drag-and-drop URLs to your bookmark bar, or bookmarks within your bookmark bar (and when I imported my bookmarks, for some reason they were scrambled inside their folders). Other than that, though - it's a browser.

I think the point isn’t necessarily to not use chrome but to use something not based on chromium in general, which brave is, e.g. Firefox or Safari.

In the grand scale of thinks, Blink-based browsers are a little better than just using Chrome.

Of course, browsers with an alternative engine like Gecko or Webkit are preferable to keep the web open.

That's not really the point. The point is to take away control from Google's user-hostile decision making, and that's a good chunk of the value proposition of Brave as a fork/patchset.

Some of Google's user-hostile decision making is backed by marketshare data. "This is what users really want, they trust us," Google says pointing to how massive Blink marketshare is. That is a cudgel they use in the standards processes and in disagreements with Apple and Mozilla that they have the most users. Brave contributes to those user counts and Google's outsized voice in the market and in the standards processes. It's great that Brave tries its best to turn off the worst things Google is doing in their fork/patchset, but they are still complicit in Google doing some of that in the first place by contributing to the marketshare of "Google's browser".

I assume most tech-savy people will want to stay far away from a browser that uses cryptonomics to confuse people into feeling better about blocking ads.