My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD.

Other problems that they'd had:

- were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us".

- They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2]

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826

1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh...

2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...