And you can't do what Google doesn't want you to do. That's a nice ad blocker you have there, shame if we removed support for it.

“The benefit of open source is that anyone can fork and modify the code!”

Yet somehow this argument seems to evaporate since people’s brains short circuit the moment they see the name Google.

The community can always fork and maintain a separate version of Chromium if necessary. Or does this concept only not apply to Chromium?

Brave literally ads an ad blocker into the browser itself. When you fork software you can do whatever you want to it.