It’s really not, until it is. I personally see it as a fallback infrastructure for redundency if Tor, VPNs, Bittorrent, etc. go dark. But other than that, no, it doesn’t really serve much of a purpose rn.

No, I beleive that is just a snowflake proxy, which basically is just used when somebody first connects to the tor network to hook them up to an entrance node. So your computer is not actually acting as a node but rather an intermediary. I would also suggest not using Brave browser because I have heard bad things about it’s owner and just their general policies. Many people say that brave browser is really just privacy cosplay. You can just get a copy of firefox and manually harden it yourself using noscript and a vpn. Or skip that and just use tor browser for all your privacy intensive stuff.