Recently here (within last hour) on July 24th 2025, Brave stopped blocking YT ads entirely.
There are also many other issues with YT, like 9-10 second loading times before video will play (due to adblockers most likely) and the YT video page not even loading (have to hit refresh once to fix).
My fix was installing the Ublock Origin Lite (yes, LITE) extension to Brave while this is being resolved.
It’s not fixed for me and requires a refresh to start working. This is the same as the non-lite version yesterday. (Today, the non-lite version stopped blocking ads.)