About the only thing I can think of is that exposure compensation is graded in stops, while most brightness tools use some arbitrary scale. If you’re doing things like “zero noise” image overlay, you’ll want to use EC, otherwise, mox nix.
I’ve eschewed brightness in favor of ‘contrast stretch’, where you use a curve to scale the image to the ends of the numerical range. I even wrote a tool to automatically find the upper and lower bounds of the histogram and scale with a so-called ‘linear curve’, a straight line between the black point and the white point. In the 0-255 scale, black is usually in the range 0-15 from zero, while white can be down toward 127 if there was not much contrast in the scene. For what it’s worth…