It looks very plausible that stretching before you exercise doesn’t do much for you. Multiple older surveys suggested this.
Annoyingly, the studies linked in the previous paragraph are 2 decades old, and somehow I can’t find a large, well controlled, trial.
This! I’m disabled, so when I started powerlifting, I took extra care to ensure I was doing things safely. Although it can be hard to parse the research, everything that I read supported what you describe (and the strategy seemed to work well for me, given that I didn’t end up crippling myself further)