Firefox

ignoring any political misgivings, brave’s always been a bloated trash heap that pushes its own ecosystem on you with unnecessary services. my advice would be to use either librewolf or use firefox and manually turn off all the telemetry and useless features you don’t care about (side-eyes pocket). if you are a die-hard chrome user ungoogled chromium seems to be the best option. really anything you might (dubiously) get from brave you can get from a browser that doesn’t try and hawk its cryptocurrency at you.

afaik duckduckgo isn’t terrible but it’s definitely been caught collecting information on your searches. better than google i guess. you could give searx a try though its self-hosted nature means it’s up to the discretion of the host what it wants to collect