Hardening does not start at choosing the right tools or networks, hardening begins with gathering information to inform yourself and others in order to stay up-to-date so that you can deal with current and upcoming threats. Tools, extensions and Co. are just a workaround until someone build the right system, that starts by voting and supporting the right politicians and organizations.
Firefox also requires setup (installing uBlock for starters). I find that setting up Brave is not any more work, and then it is indeed a pretty good browser.
But that's the whole point of Brave. If you're not interested in crypto, pick a browser that's just a browser. There are better choices: Safari, GNOME Web, Falkon, Firefox.
Safari: not an option outside of Macs. Gnome Web: barely usable. Falkon: insecure due to no/low maintenance (think the last release is years ago). Firefox: requires setup too.
Falkon relies on Qt for QtWebEngine, not Plasma. Which has its maintenance issues of its own (look it up, it's a chore nobody really likes doing and is therefore infrequent, something you don't want for a web engine).
Falkon, on many platforms, links Qt statically, so you stil rely on them making timely releases.
It is absolutely not a browser anybody should use.
GNOME Web has next to no UI over WebKit, so the claim is easily verified.
GNOME web is truly bad. Not only is it WebKit based (which puts it at a stark disadvantage out of the gate), but it also lacks tons of features like extention support, settings sync, custom themes, robust developer tooling, PWA support, the list goes on...
Hell, GNOME web hasn't even fixed it's text rendering issues yet. Text is still jagged and aliased out-of-the box. It's definitely on the cusp of "unusably bad"
The point of using a Chromium fork is full extension compatibility, same rendering engine and similar-enough featureset (what matters varies by user, which is why just forking Chromium works best). None of your suggestions match these requirements.