That’s more secure than most setups, the VPN with killswitch will defeat any and all attacks you’re likely to encounter if you don’t open files on that same VM.

FDE is for physical attackers, it would have nothing to do with torrenting unless you’re really intending on pissing off every single criminal legal authority and not just worried about civil suits from copyright holders.

I mean, does that mean Edge is a Google browser, too?

Yes.

All that to say: while the company that originally created Chromium is bad, the software isn’t.

Only to the extent that websites are built for chromium compatibility, due to its monopoly on the internet. It’s great software because it’s the most popular software so all other smaller providers that serve that software have to focus their resources into ensuring compatibility. Chromium(Blink) itself is pretty mid, and definitely equal to WebKit or Gecko, not better or significantly worse.

It’s really hard for the creator of Javascript to make money off of javascript, and it’s unlikely he has any financial interest in the Mozilla corporation anymore since they’re a nonprofit and thus don’t have share holders. However, he directly profits off of Brave.

This is a serious problem I think isn’t actually talked about enough. There is a ‘ring of trust’ on most social media now that in my opinion goes far too far; if you don’t have enough algorithmically determined ‘trust,’ you’ll be booted off without a way to appeal. Reddit shadowbans the vast majority of new accounts, but hasn’t been able to cut down on spambots; Facebook by its nature needs ridiculous amounts of personal information but even then doesn’t actually use it to assign more trust since bot-owners can supply generated information that’s equally as valid; really all social media, especially if you do anything at all to protect your privacy, assumes you’re a spambot first, then only lets you participate after you prove beyond a shadow of a doubt you might be a human. I understand we’re already half way into developing a dead internet, but there’s no reason we need to go full throttle into it by limiting actual humans from signing up past a certain point in a product’s lifespan.

One could say The Industrial Revolution and Its Consequences have been a disaster for the human race; but that sentiment tends to get you put on a list now-a-days for some weird reason.