Well, you were the one posting the screenshot that clearly has extensions installed on it:
So it is weird you say you don’t have extensions installed.
Did you try opening NPR in InPrivate window? if it acts differently, then it is something that only works in Normal windows and not Private.
Did you go to brave://settings/content/siteDetails?site=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org and reset permissions and removed data?
Did you try starting the browser with --user-data-dir= give it a temporary path and done, you don’t need to close your current main browser for this, it acts independently (or that’s what it is supposed to do)
That way you will truly test the browser since it will be a new clear user data.
net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT = Blocked by an adblocker BTW. In my case it is working fine in Brave with 19 elements being logged by Shields and 16 blocked elements in Devtools.
Anyway, it works on my side
Unless Brave was really broken on awful Linux/Debian, there is no reason why the button is getting blocked in Brave, when Brave uses Chromium, it is not like it is doing anything differently when rendering a page.