I'm not sure if you mean to say people like me arguing to separate patrons, artists and the art - especially where this is open source - or people like the writer of the article in the OP.

So I'll speak to it from both ends: people naturally want to vote with their time and money. If money is seeing ads and generating crypto for someone they don't support; fine. I think everyone understands where they're coming from. On the other hand I can google github + project-name for brave and find all the code and fork it...if you don't like something about brave just fork it or use a stripped down fork.

I don't use brave to begin with but the public executions are fucking obnoxious when the product hasn't taken a unilateral shift in direction. Twitter and Reddit were proprietary platform you were locked in for if you used them daily. There was never an alternative way to use those products in their full functionality; both had to be 100% recreated on mastodon/lemmy. If you don't like Brave's CEO you can literally fork the project, remove the shit you don't like and use the work for free.