Yes, exactly. Why not mine a few asteroids, deploy comms and mapping sats, etc.
Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who have exactly zero experience of planet-side ops with hostile terrain and meteorology, with physical tools that they have never used in an operational setting.
Yep - it really makes sense to do it like that - I don't say planets are useless, but if you just arrived after possibly hundreds of years in deep space, you might as well par you ark somewhere safe and resource rich, do any repairs or upgrades, gather some resources, while possibly doing some initial exploration by probes or even small initial crewed missions.
It might be different for other missing profiles, like some very compact minimalistic missions where everyone is in some sort of suspended animation & you dump the whole ship into a suitable planetary environment, as to ship is just not setup to sustain them for any period on board. But this requires quite substantial advances in both stashing colonists for possibly hundreds of years without killing them as well as getting a compact ship to a star system with habitable planet, decelerating it there and landing it.
Seems more likely we will have the first trillion of extra terrestrial humans living in diverse habitats built from local materials at a nearby star much sooner than something like that.
Building a ground civ from scratch would be hard enough for anyone, let alone a space-adapted population who have spent generations being coddled by AI, and who have exactly zero experience of planet-side ops with hostile terrain and meteorology, with physical tools that they have never used in an operational setting.