The guy who runs the site literally works for Brave. It says so in the about page.

Oftentimes it’s done because it’s cheaper, though oftentimes it’s actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.

Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It’s a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.

Firmware doesn’t run on an OS, you’re probably thinking of drivers which are different. Drivers are software that tell the OS how to interact with specific hardware.

Firmware is software that’s baked into specific hardware components and it exists outside of the OS. A visible example most people are familiar with would be the BIOS which is firmware for the motherboard. Hard drives, graphics cards, RAM, etc all also have their own firmware.

Other devices such as microwaves, washing machines, cars, or anything using microprocessors (so pretty much everything these days) also have components with their own firmware. It is true that device firmware can drive a UI on some devices such a as a microwave, but most people today wouldn’t consider that to be an OS (semantics, I know).

It’s not like he just wrote a check. He took out loans and got other investors to sign on to fund the Twitter purchase. Even someone as wealthy as him has to answer to others.