I don't know a lot, so maybe you know more than me. The tracking and logging is via cookies, right?

The same cookies that brave automatically blocks?

Again, maybe they do some tracking via some other method that I don't know about; I'm not an expert. But it seems to me that Brave was essentially scamming those companies by using their referral codes but denying them any useful data. Great for brave, sucks for the companies, shouldn't matter to us.