What I was looking for were which files could be deleted from the Brave and Chrome folders that are naturally built up over time that are basically garbage. I was looking for a list of file or a program that lists these, that are in these Browsers folders that could be deleted.
I understand. To answer that question I know of nothing that would accomplish what you seek correctly, which is to say it would have some clairvoyant ability to distinguish "garbage" from essential files required by Brave (for example) or anything else in general. If one were to ask Apple (or Brave, or Google, or Microsoft, or any other developer) which of their files are "garbage" they would almost certainly say "none of them" for the simple reason that someone at some time thought they were required, and no one other than that someone has the ability to conclusively determine they're wrong.
That means any third party "cleaner" can only guess what is and isn't required, and those guesses are often wrong.
To illustrate the effects of such guesswork, another popular "cleaner" program helpfully offered to "clean" a file it considered "garbage" but once that file was removed, the affected Mac began to perform poorly along with a loud fan and terrible battery life... the common effect of having used such programs. That user brought it to me complaining that Macs are garbage, it's a piece of junk, etc. Reinstalling macOS was no help and the user was about to give up. It was only through my own hands-on evaluation of it that I determined the aforementioned "cleaning" app — which had long since been removed — "cleaned" a file in the user space that it considered "garbage" but was nevertheless required by macOS to operate. The Mac was working overtime constantly trying to write to a file that no longer existed.
Why did reinstalling macOS not fix it? That particular file is not installed by macOS, it is created as a consequence of creating a User Account. If that user had created another User Account, trashed the original account and logged in under the new one, it would have worked fine. But that's not a practicable solution, nor would I consider it an acceptable one.
Why didn't Apple's macOS engineers anticipate the possibility a user might do something dumb and simply coded a routine to re-create a file it created, but no longer existed for reasons unknown? Good question, and Apple spends countless hours toward making macOS more robust against such contingencies, but at some point it's not reasonable to expect them or anyone else to think of literally every possible thing someone might do to break their Macs.
It should also be pointed out that it took a lot of hands-on, time consuming, personal attention to fix that Mac. Fixing it was (for me) a simple matter of re-creating the file in the correct location and in the format required by macOS.
Summary:
- don't use "cleaning" apps, and
- if you used it, uninstalling it might not help.
Now back to your original question about Brave. I did inspect the contents of this Mac which has been using Brave for perhaps two years. In it, I found a folder containing about 2.5 GB of support files for Brave. Among them, the largest single contributor was about 2.25 GB of cache files. Yes, you can certainly delete them, but remember that cache files exist to increase performance.
In general cache files are used in lieu of having to download an identical file, which always takes more time than loading it from local storage. It's up to the browser to maintain that database of files. If you intervene, the short term effects will be a degradation in performance as those files are repopulated. However, you stand the risk of deleting something else the program really requires, and those effects might be that it won't work, or it will crash, or some other unwanted or unanticipated results may occur. Right now I'm working on at least two different circumstances in which I suspect that may have happened. I don't like having to tell people to erase their Macs and start all over from the beginning, but given the constraints of remote support often it's the most expedient solution.
Even 2 GB of cache files isn't all that much. No one wants to think their Macs have accumulated "garbage" but even if some files are dormant and completely unnecessary, they have zero effect on performance. They're just occupying space, and not much space at that.
When it doubt, you're better off leaving well enough alone. If you're curious and can accept the risk of breaking things, by all means go ahead. After all that's how we learn things, and ideally go on to teach others what we've learned. Just have a contingency plan (Time Machine or the equivalent), and you're fine.
