No, brave is not bad for your privacy. There has been some controversie but no dealbreaker so far imo.
If you're on mobile I think brave has hands down the best UX (not necessarily UI but I like it a lot), on desktop I recommend firefox, which has a lot of custom themes to choose from (https://firefoxcss-store.github.io).
I like Firefox mostly because it's cool to have engine competition. I mostly use the default dark theme. It looks good enough for me. I don't look much at the top when browsing.
On android it's still lagging behind the chromium competition.
And having mismatched browsers isn't great for syncing.
So I just use Firefox on android too, good enough.
Tho, if miss matching wasn't an issue, personally I think I would use Kiwi browser. It's an open source chromium browser which supports chrome extensions.
It's less about whether any individual thing they've done has been bad, more that they keep doing things and keep doing thm in sneaky ways. Every time something happened the CEO went on a marketing campaign and drummed up a bunch of new users to drown out the news story. They come across as shady, which gives the impression that it would take a relatively small sack of money for them to sell their users up the river.
Brave is better than some out of the box, but far from the best. I'd say Mull is better for mobile, which is a Firefox fork. It has a companion Android System Webview called Mulch.