I mean, Opera were owned by Russians before that, right? It’s never been world leading in privacy. I think its strength lies in rolling out features well before anyone else is ready to even test them!
On that vein, Firefox has traditionally focussed on privacy. I seem to remember that they denounced VPNs as a privacy tool because all your traffic is funnelled into one place which is a tasty target for any attackers. It seems they are now more confident in VPNs.
According to the blog/whitepaper, Brave is trying to decentralise the burden using dVPN technology. They already have TOR profiles on their desktop browsers which breaks every other website obviously. Hopefully this dVPN is a bit more usable!