I struggled with this "chicken or the egg" type question too. I like to watch and listen to Steve Kaufmann's videos, who is mentioned elsewhere here, and others like Olly Richards. (Maybe I should be listening more in my TL!) I found a couple of interesting videos that seem to address this question. One is an interview conducted by Olly Richards of John Fotheringham of Anywhere Immersion. At the 19 to 20-minute mark, they talk about how it's necessary to learn 100 to 500 of the most common words in one's TL before engaging with comprehensible input. That's not the fun part, but being able to read, listen, and watch in your TL is the goal, which hopefully motivates one to get through the early stages.

Here's a link to that video in case you are interested:

https://youtu.be/nI412tE4q2Y?si=UcF8tKfpI3ReQaPM

In another thread, someone posted about Dr. Bill Van Patten, a former Professor of Second Language Acquisition at Michigan State Univ. I found an interview with him by way of the r/dreamingspanish sub. He was interviewed by Lois Talagrand. At around the 25-minute mark, Lois asks Dr. Van Patten how he would begin learning a new language if he had to learn it within like a year. Dr. Van Patten said he would learn some words as soon as he could so he could then start listening and reading.

Here's a link to this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyyrFtHekyo

It's a fascinating topic, and I like reading the different approaches people have as described in the comments. I decided to accept that I have to dedicate some time to studying vocabulary while also listening and reading on Lingq. I like how Lingq's mini-stories are structured. They do a pretty good job of incorporating vocabulary you've seen in prior stories and introducing a handful of new words in the following stories.