Where do most people (other than institutional investors) store their crypto?
I am so curious and I can bet it's on exchanges as most institutional
investors keep funds there as well
You don't. Keeping a wallet in your computer, does not mean the money is in your computer, it never is.
Wallets, despite their misleading name, don't hold the coins. They hold KEYS to the coins. The coins are always "in the cloud", also known as the blockchain. You can only move them around if you own the keys to them.
They would be more appropriately called key holders, but its too hard a concept to explain common folk, so its easier to just keep calling the thing a wallet.
But its important you know the difference, because that is why, you can create a wallet, delete it, and still have access to it later as long as you kept the seed words which the wallet software uses to restore the private key.
And, it also means, those words are the most important. Backup? No. Password? no. The words, those seed words, that's all that matters. Understand this, so you can act properly later.
And, create and use cold wallets, which is a wallet created in this fashion, and immediately deleted (not before having a bunch of addresses copied so you can keep sending funds to it).
The funds are in the blockchain, not in your computer.
