Is your BTC actually accessible to your family, or just theoretically theirs?

Been thinking about this after reading through a few threads on lost coins. Estimates put lost BTC somewhere around 3-4 million coins already — permanently gone, not because of hacks, but because the person who held the keys died (or lost access) and nobody else could get in.

The part that gets glossed over: even if your family legally inherits your Bitcoin (will, probate, whatever), that's completely separate from whether they can actually access it. A grant of probate doesn't unlock a hardware wallet. It doesn't pass 2FA. If nobody documented where the seed phrase is or which exchanges you used, "inheriting" the BTC just means inheriting a wallet address they can see on a block explorer and can't do anything with.

A few things worth actually sitting down and answering honestly:

• If something happened to you today, would your spouse/family even know which exchanges or wallets to look for?
• If your 2FA is tied to your phone and only your phone, what happens when the phone is locked and nobody has the PIN?
• Is your seed phrase written somewhere your family could plausibly find — but a random person going through your stuff couldn't?

Not trying to be morbid, just think this is one of those things that's genuinely easy to put off indefinitely because it forces you to think about your own death, but the cost of not doing it is total and permanent for the people you'd actually want to inherit it.

Curious if anyone here has actually been on the "family member died, tried to access their BTC" side of this. Did it work? Did anything get lost?