Unless Brave is forking Chromium, Google owns them. Google controls what gets merged into Chromium. Brave can talk the talk all they want, but they merely exist as a Chrome skin with crypto added in and a few privacy features included.
I know they are committed to supporting Manifest v2 (I think), but more and more decisions are going to have to be made where they differ from upstream Chromium. I have doubts this will be sustainable forever.