Yes, and what you describe can also be done with gold ETFs and while it sounds nice, in practice it does not happen.

Large investment firms, RIAs, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds and the like often cannot hold a physical commodity (per their own rules) or do not want to do so even if they legally could. They purchase into these ETFs and cannot/will not/do not redeem to purchase underlying.

But yes, it is easier for a pleb like you and me to do this with the ETF, but I imagine we already hold real bitcoin and not ETFs in any meaningful qty. For example, the Wisconsin Pension Fund that holds over $160M in bitcoin ETFs is not going to be holding spot bitcoin anytime soon :)