That's an easy yes. Brave is spyware, and that should have been easily assumed by absolutely everyone from the fact that they were seeing ads for it. If you see ads for something, it's a scam, guaranteed.

The best thing about LibreWolf is that it has strong defaults. Keep in mind that it doesn't keep history by default, though, you have to enable that.

https://digdeeper.club/articles/browsers.xhtml
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/