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I think what you're describing are the "Tip" buttons which can be added on a few supported sites (which can be disabled). They aren't selling anything- it's a browser feature which people can use if they like.
The server implementation for sync is mostly compatible with Chromium and can be used without Brave. Someone could clone https://github.com/brave/go-sync and stand up their own server. It would require some patches on top of Chromium (similar to what is done in Brave) to implement the authentication - but once that is done, all of the Chromium tools like chrome://sync-internals work just fine
There's still Google features in Chromium, just not the features google doesn't want anyone looking at the source.
Here's a fork of chromium with the other google bits removed. https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium
You can self-host it with 3d party https://github.com/ishani/xSyn
Chromium variants: Edge support is planned for v1.6.0. (https://github.com/xbrowsersync/app/wiki/Roadmap) v1.5.2 is the current version.
Collections: Don't know, I'm not using collections.
There used to be a Python sync server used in the Chromium project that was used to test sync functionality. Someone discovered this and yanked out the relevant code to enable self hosting.
https://github.com/infeeeee/chrome-sync-server
The server was replaced and removed from the upstream repo now but it does give insight as to how it works.
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