it has zero effect on me as a user tbh

I have a bad taste in my mouth around crypto as well, but I don't think lumping all crypto efforts together is fair. What Brave tried to do was awesome IMHO. They wanted to promote an ad-free internet by making micro-transaction/micro-payment possible, which pays content creators. Particularly at the time they started it, crypto looked like a fantastic way to do that. That many scummy people starting creating shitcoins and pumping them to steal money from others really tainted the whole thing, but I strongly believe that was never Brave's intention.

You can completely switch off crypto stuff and it will not show the icon at all