I was able to get back my passwords by doing the following for windows:
step 1: make a copy of your login data so if a mistake is made its not gone for good, this copy needs to be in another fold not related to the brave folders.
step 2: move original also to another folder, we will this file later
step 3: start up brave to get a new login data file
step 4: open up both the new login data file, and the original login data with notepad++, set the notepad to use UNiX, and copy everything below the black box from the original login data into the new login data, making sure to preserve the null data, it wont work if the null tags are removed. they can just be copied below all of the text in the new login data.