I've been using Brave for about a year at this point. I don't think that the Brave Rewards thing where you can earn cryptocurrency for seeing ads is as big of a deal as it may have been when they first launched.
But as far as ad blocking? It's great. I haven't seen a YouTube ad but maybe a handful of times in that year. Privacy seems good too, though browser fingerprinting is still a problem no matter what program you use.
You mean DuckDuckGo, right? I use it for searches sometimes. I also use the Brave Browser. DuckDuckGo isn't the same as Brave though, Brave is a browser, DuckDuckGo is a search engine. With Brave you can also search with DuckDuckGo if you want to.