You’re right. I mistakenly came to conflate ETF with passive.

How so?

Probably, good… for investors. It’s better to invest in ETFs over mutual funds for many/most people. A mutual fund is an investment vehicle in which a manager aggregates a bunch of stocks and sells share in the group of stocks. This limits the risk and ensures more gains but the manager needs to be paid. An ETF is like a mutual fund without a manager, the choice of stocks is done automatically by computer software and tries to track the market (or market segment) as a whole. So, less money is lost to paying fund managers and the software is pretty smart.

History has shown a that, on average, automatically managed funds outperform funds managed by people.

There are a lot of people out there who think they are smarter than the market, including fund managers. They are not. If you have money to invest, like in a IRA or 401k, you should put it in ETFs.