I'm tired of seeing ads on "how you can make 15$ watching one video and earning 20k in a month doing almost nothing" and I can't find a way to report it.
I don't think it's as much reducing performance, as it is stamping out poorly optimized cpu calls that make it work harder than it should.
Several reviewers I saw all said that the heat up issue is not consistent with doing performance work. One of them spent the whole day shooting 4k in the sun and the phone was fine. Then he went to use spotify while in airplane mode (literally on a plane) and the phone just started heating up for no reason.
Update: Moving form Zen to regular 6.5.4 kernel greatly reduced the number and intensity of crackles. Unfortunatly, moving from regular to 6.1 lts remained with the same reduced crackles.
I believe Brave is the most private chromium browser, at least with the installation defaults.
As for the controversies with the company, there were some at the beginning stages, but I haven't heard anything new in quite a while.
Regarding the crypto, vpn, etc bloat, I use Brave on all my devices and all I have to do is hide that stuff after the installation and I've never been bothered by pop-ups or similar annoyances. I don't think it's more annoying to remove than having to remove the recommended sites and Pocket with Firefox.
Since you want private browsing, I would also say that a big plus for Brave is that it has built-in Tor browser.
Bold of you to assume that that screen is gonna last 7 years.