Yeah I just tried downloading the latest version and it looks much better now. I remember I tried ~3 years ago or so and it was horribly inefficient, so I deleted it, then gave it another shot around a year ago and came to the same conclusion.
But yes, from running it ~10 minutes just now, it looks quite reasonable.
Yeah, they did improve it recently (within the past year or so). I see that Brave uses a gateway by default, I guess that's good for adoption but bad for decentralization. Then again, users don't care about decentralization as much as they care about convenience, so that's a good first step.
(Though on a Linux system I also modified the low water setting up to 1000 peers and the high water setting to 2000 peers)