Putting ads in your websites doesn't turn your browser into a product any more than putting ad into a PDF turns your PDF reader into a product or getting robocall turn your phone into (more of) a product. That's completely orthogonal.
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.
Putting ads in my websites turns me into a product.
We need to turn this whole ecosystem on its head. How do we do that? I'd rather have the browser manage payments to the sites I use based on some usage statistics, but in this case, we still need some sort of payment system, probably centralized. It might not be turning the actual browser into a product, but it does make it put it awfully close to one.
Well in the case of Brave that might not be completely true because they have this whole agenda regarding ads but that's specific to this particular browser, not a fundamental aspect of web browsing technology. ELinks is not a product because you can use it to view ads for instance.