See: ‘Deleting frequently visited site does not re-add itself later - #5 by 289wk’
Read the 2 EXCERPTS.
My guess is, there is a connection between the processing therein, and, the mysterious loss of a Brave Browser user’s Profile data (a mixed bag of history, passwords, tabs, etc.) that plagues some Windows OS users of the Brave Browser.
In your case, a Brave Browser process used data from the History-journal file, in order to restore at least something of a History file.