I think on your browser, brave shield is disabled. You are seeing the orange lion icon still, but the shield in itself is diabled.
See, Disable Brave Shield for good
Also, to turn off the icon itself go to brave://flags and then disable sheild for v1 and v2 (version) New "Brave Shields" button now much less useful for me - #2 by anoraknophobia (disable both of them)
Also, DNS level adblocking is different from browser level adblocking. There are a lot of extra perks/pros of doing DNS level + browser level adblocking.
Currently, some ads are served from the same domain of the website, which Dns level adblocking cannot block the ads.
Eg., youtube ads are served from the same domain, from which the videos are served. So using pihole, adguard dns, nextdns will not do it. You will need brave shield, ublock origin for it.