I’m gonna disagree with a few points here, but I agree with the spirit that the reasoning is somewhat flawed. First, unless you enable AdGuard’s advanced blocking extension, it is implemented through content blockers. This provides the browser with a list of rules and lets it do the actual blocking, meaning AdGuard does not have access to your web activity. Second, I’ve had no issues with AdGuard blocking compared to Brave, so I also can’t say I agree with the claim that it’s less effective (I have the AdGuard annoyances filter enabled and it takes care of that Speedtest banner just fine).
With that out of the way, my thoughts on recommending Safari as the sole iOS browser largely echo yours. I also don’t quite understand the reasoning that using Brave adds trust rather than transferring it. Unless this is more complicated than I believe it to be, isn’t it a similar situation to Brave using Chromium on other platforms? It’s not like we would recommend using Chrome over Brave since “you’re trusting Google anyway.” Brave genuinely brings a lot to the table as previously mentioned (custom search engines being huge as Safari is directly incompatible with some of the search engine recommendations), which warrants adding it to the iOS browser recommendations in my opinion. I’m actually not opposed to it joining Safari rather than replacing it as Safari is pretty decent, though I’d understand if Safari was removed should an open-source requirement be added.
The iOS browser situation is an unfortunate one at the moment, but I don’t think it should stop us recommending trusted options that we already endorse for other platforms in the absence of glaring technical issues (the whole “adding trust” thing seems pedantic in this case). I would also like team members to weigh in on this again, as Brave has also simply come a long way in features since the whole Safari thing was decided.