When you use Gmail’s app and have “open web links in Gmail” disabled, so you can open links in Brave, Google will prepend “google.com/url?q=” to every link you tap in emails. This both slows down browsing, and introduces unwanted tracking.
It would be great if Brave intercepted these forwarding “man in the middle” techniques and would just skip to the url that’s in the query string, without sending a request to the forwarding url.