I hope this experience can possibly help Brave improve the linux experience, because as of now, it sucks for the new user following the intuitive path. But - this thread should have an answer, and I will post the answer for this example, in case someone else gets led down this path.
If your Brave is unable to update itself and is prompting you to reinstall, and you seem to be trapped in a state of being unable to uninstall, or unable to reinstall without ending up with 2 co-existing installations, you may have installed via flatpak. This is a known problematic method of installation, and is not recommended.
If this is indeed the case, running the command of “flatpak remove com.brave.Browser” from a terminal should complete an uninstall. (run “sudo apt update” after uninstallation to update list of installed packages)
If this has worked and you’ve confirmed Brave is no longer installed, install Brave through the recommended process found at https://brave.com/linux/