What controversies? The affiliate link one? Have you looked into it yourself or have you just heard opinions? Brave is infinitely better than DuckDuckGo which is following the steps of Big tech in censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjWDfIpwEAQ
Also, DDG is really a Bing frontend, like that's not even an opinion, it's literally in their FAQ: Where do DuckDuckGo search results come from? | DuckDuckGo Help Pages
They pay $7 for 1k queries, DDG is literally Bing. So all you're really doing is helping Bing gather your search query data to improve it further, even though the search queries themselves are proxied. Brave Search is miles better because it's an independent index that does not track you and is free from censorship as already declared by them. Supporting DDG is supporting censorship, Supporting DDG is supporting Bing, Supporting DDG is supporting Big Tech and I wouldn't have it.