My daily driver is Firefox (and I abandoned Google Chrome long ago), but if I have to choose, for whatever reason, between sending requests directly to Google and sending requests to Brave, I'd choose the latter. I do trust Brave more than I trust Google (yes, I'm also aware of the controversies with a rave about its founder and about its micropayments service). I wish Mozilla would actually proxy requests to Google, since I trust Mozilla a lot more.
What you're advocating is for Mozilla to become a walled-garden, just like Brave and Chrome are.
Since when is a walled-garden a good thing?
If you trust Mozilla more than you trust Google, I think it follows that you should also trust their decision that NOT proxying and going directly to Google.com for this data is acceptable.
We ought to expect more from Mozilla on this.