Honestly, after this latest stunt by Google and Brave’s growing list of issues, I recently switched to Firefox myself. It was actually surprisingly less painful than it was switching from Chrome to Brave.

Despite turning off settings to open new tabs, every website I open browsing on mobile opens a new tab

That shouldn’t happen, I’ve just set Homepage > Opening screen to last tab and when I open firefox it defaults to the last tab that I was on before exiting the browser

I had to adjust a ton of settings to stop it from downloading in the background every file I just wanted to view or print

Iirc its just setting browser.download.open_pdf_attachments_inline to true at about:config

Fair enough, you have an opinion, that firefox is wrong in everything it does, it’s not valid, but you need to learn the defaults. Be well.

I had to adjust a ton of settings to stop it from downloading in the background every file I just wanted to view or print,

Well, you can’t view or print a file without downloading it.

Give Vivaldi a try, it’s a chromium fork but with a strong focus on privacy.