Exactly how I feel, which is why I’d be psyched if Mozilla joined in so that system could be extended to the browser I use lol

I’d also love if they could do it this way, but I just don’t think it’s realistic tbh. In brave’s system it’s just up to the specific content creator to accept rewards - someone on YouTube could opt in without requiring google themselves to stop showing ads on the site in general (not gonna happen imo). Also, it’s not a reality I’m happy with, but Firefox and brave together are negligible for websites compared to chrome (65% of users use chrome 😭) so expecting websites to globally remove ads for non-chrome specific features is unlikely. Web devs could show ads based on user agent, sure, but that’s more work for the devs themselves compared to just blocking the ads and allowing them to say yes or no to be rewarded for their content.
BAT vs taler wise, I personally don’t care - I feel like the system works with either, so if they wanted to stick with BAT or switch it up I’d be happy either way. The part that’s important for me is the ability to reward creators independently from the websites that host them - like rewarding both is great, but in the case a website hasn’t/won’t done the work to disable ads (cough cough YouTube, Facebook/ig, etc)I still think creators should be able to benefit from the system. The last time I used BAT (which was very early after it launched tbh, things may have really changed) you could buy BAT (or watch ads for it, but the experience was truly shit and I immediately turned it off) and donate directly to websites (I gave some to Wikipedia iirc) or creators (I don’t watch YouTube but I heard some had signed up on there) or just let brave watch the time you spent on sites and divide your BAT between them proportionally monthly(?). Literally the only downside was like you said, adoption wasn’t incredible back then - but keep in mind that Firefox has 2.74% of users and brave is a rounding error. Firefox coming on board could dramatically increase engagement if all websites have to do is say “yea sure” to getting money from a small subset of their users, but I just really don’t see the majority of devs bothering to write new logic and fundamentally change their sites for the fraction of the Firefox+brave users who choose to donate (who are already a tiny fraction of their traffic).
Endgame ofc I agree should be to make tracking ads a thing of the past, but tbh I just don’t see the benefit of convincing websites to stop but only for a fraction of their users - like if you stumbled onto a random website and saw they said they’d opted into the program and wouldn’t track you / show ads… would you disable your adblocker? Imo until a system like this gets EXTREMELY wide adoption we have to be using adblocker anyway, so expecting devs to do a lot of work just so we can run the blockers on their page seems less than ideal to me.

Would you want your full identity being associated with every page you donate to, especially if the donations happen based on you just visiting? Idc if it’s crypto or another alternative personally, but it absolutely has to be properly anonymous or at least have the ability to be. Especially at the time BAT launched, crypto was the only way I personally knew to achieve that - if Mozilla wants to get on board and switch away from crypto to something equally anonymous, I’d be thrilled, but imo this is a good use case for crypto anyway so it doesn’t bother me.