Firefox newbie, how does a minimal setup compare to brave in privacy and ad blocking?

Hi guys, firefox newbie here.

So uh, I just switched to firefox after using brave for almost half a decade. For whatever reason, brave stopped playing nicely with my laptop, switching tabs would frequently trigger a system wide lockup, forcing me to do a hard force shutdown. This happened frequentlyeven after multiple clean installs of my OS, so I'm fairly certain brave was the culprit. Got fed up, I decided to do another clean install and leave brave behind to see if the crashes stopped.

Today, when I booted up firefox for the first time, I felt pretty overwhelmed, the homepage was loaded with stuff, and the settings offer a massive amount of customization (maybe too much for my taste).

With brave, my routine was always simple,

1. Download the browser
2. Import my CSV password list
3. Set up my filter lists
4. Set Cloudflare as my DNS
5. Call it a day

I rarely touched any other settings and felt secure enough.

My questions for you guys:

1. If I set up firefox using that exact same (or pretty similar) minimal routine, how does it compare to brave in terms of privacy and ad tracking protection and anything else???
2. Did brave actually give me superior ad/tracker blocking over the last five years, or was it just a placebo effect making me feel more private??

I would love to hear your thoughts, thanks.