From article:
If you have the Brave Browser installed on your Windows devices, then you may also have Brave VPN services installed on the machine. Brave installs these services without user consent on Windows devices.
More reason to ditch the crypto bro browser.
Chromium, and no. It’s downstream from it and they remove the parts they don’t like. They did some things in the past that makes them highly untrustworthy in my opinion (like replacing affiliate links with their own ones or using user data from their search engine to train AI) but Brave is still far better than Chrome.