If people like Brave's ad model, all the power to them. I would personally never touch it. I'm not philosophically on board with the idea that paying people to look at ads is a pragmatic way forward. It doesn't matter if it's opt-in, free-to-play games with loot crates are opt-in, but the decision to go down that road will effect their decision making process when designing new features and I don't want to be part of it even indirectly.

Brave is unethical. The key problem is they insert themselves into the revenue stream without the consent of the web publishers. It's fine to block ads entirely, but substituting your own ads and collecting money from that is wrong.

I'm not sure I see the clear cut ethical dilemma you do.

Option 1. block all ads, publishers receive no revenue.

Option 2. block all ads, user opts in to unrelated ads, user can choose to give some of the proceeds of seeing those ads to publishers they utilize.

How can (2) possibly be worse than (1)?

Because it inserts a middleman who takes a cut that the publisher did not enter into an agreement with. If it was just users giving to publishers, that would be fine. Having a middleman hold the publisher's monetization hostage is ethically dubious for the middleman.

Consider that I could pirate a movie, or I could pirate it and pay the creators directly, leaving out the distributors the creators contracted with. I fully agree that the second is slightly more ethical than the first, even though the creator agreed to neither. The problem occurs when some Tube site distributes the videos without the creators' consent, collects money from the viewers, takes a cut, and passes the rest to the creator. The Tube site is ethically wrong.

Tokens only go to verified publishers. Signing up to receive them is basically that consent. Otherwise (site or channel not verified), the transaction never leaves the user's browser

wikipedia.org, slashdot.org, and other sites that show a purple checkmark in the URL bar have gone through that verification process

"I blocked your source of revenue, now I'm holding some money which you can either sign up to receive a fraction of, or don't and you won't get any" doesn't sound like "consent" to me.

Are you saying that site owners should feel violated by folks installing ad-blockers (or using host files)?