I've never tried Nu finish or mineral spirits in walnut media....yet. Always used the Lyman brass polish and had good results.
Mineral spirits is a solvent. Removing old wax from furniture, either mineral spirits or kerosene can be used. I suspect when adding the mineral spirits to the walnut media (call it the furniture), you are lifting the wax it from the walnut and the walnut becomes more abrasive to the brass and there becomes more unbound wax to coat the brass. Not sure how much equilibrium of wax there is between the brass and walnut media after tumbling, but every time you tumble, the wax is distributed between both. Mineral spirits releases the wax from the walnut media.
I've washed brass in dish soap/water and put it in the tumbler before it was 100% dry and tumbled with the top off. It clumped some at first, then evened out. The moisture seemed to clean the brass even better than when dry brass was added. I'm not recommending it,...I've just done it in the past. No walnut was stuck in the cases any more than when dry brass was used either. I suspected the walnut absorbs the moisture and re-energizes (for lack of a better word) the conditioner. For this reason, I don't need to dry the brass all the way if I'm going to tumble it immediately. If I'm storing it in plastic bags I make sure it's 100% dry.