I mean, it's not enforced. You just need KYC if you need to accept the payments. We can still freely use Brave with it's great privacy features without submitting KYC. A very slightly misleading title if you ask me.
While I think this is unfortunate and I don't like KYC as well, but in my understanding, as a registered and regulated company, they really have no choice as they're currently using UpHold. Hopefully this is just a "bandage solution" just to keep the system running right now. Not sure if they're allowed(by law) to distribute the BAT peer-to-peer, but I hope they would be in the future.
why would you want to use it after this and when there are good browsers like Firefox available which is the original code of this project?
Afaik the original codebase is from Chromium not Firefox.