glad the sponsored images are paying you again, about the push notifications. something similar happened to me but in may case it was for a month. this solved it for me
enable the next options:
brave://flags/#enable-system-notifications
brave://flags/#brave-ads-custom-push-notifications-ads
this seems to happend very randomly, some people don’t seem to be affected while other do, in my case I don’t get push notifications ads if those aren’t enabled. base system notifications doesn’t seem to like being used for brave rewards in my laptop (windows 8.1)
hope this help you