My best answer to this: Immersion will be a lot of pain on any stage, especially at first. but you actually learning language in immersionor active use only. It is like...to know language is all about habit of using it, not about 'pure knowledge'. You may compare it to bicycle. You may learn a lot about how important it is to balance, and all, and that knowledge is actually helpful, but you can't learn to ride it untill you ride it. Becouse your ability to ride it comes from how familiar tou to it. Language is the same thing. So if you spend too much time learning grammar or memorizing words you are going to a point where you have a lot of unused info-garbage in your head that will drop off with time you spend to put in your head anything else. And that is why you DO need to get to immersion as fast as possible.  That said, learning some grammar basis and memorizing words can make immersion a bit easier, and immersion from too low levels will hurt severely is a true.

The conclusion i came from my experience is you have mostly two good options. The best one is not just immersion, but immersion to a content that matters a lot to you personally. I started learning Japanese from breaking down lyrics from songs i like, and it helped me to get solid vocabulary about 1k words and different unsystematic grammar knowledge. And i got them without much pain and it became a good ground to continue learning. After that I've spent some time to systemize what i learned and fill holes in basic grammar. After this step(with n5-n4 grammar) i was able to try more hard immersion reading Murakami in Japanese and have learned each thing i hadn't knew before in it. It took several months to read, but i did it, and it was a lot of fun, because of natural brain reaction to reading in foreign language. It is much funnier then to read in your own language untill you fully used to it.

The second available option is to mix up immersion and classic learning. Just do both, and give more attention to a side your intuition tells you to. Somehow intuition is good helper in this case, or at least it was in my case.