That sounds right, yep!
Just bumped into this problem …
I think the OP is looking for the HTML Link preload tag <link rel="preload" …/>
@pailhead, preloading is very effective when you don’t need the resources (images, videos, audios …) immediately, but you know you will load them at some point in your app. The most likely scenario, is preloading the resources of the next stage of a mini-game or preloading the VR/AR version of your scene for when the user hit that start button …
By using the <link rel="preload" .../> the browser is optimized to effectively preload/load and cache the assets, reducing the loading time when you need to really load them.
It also works with files like JSON, GLTF, glb …
<link rel="preload" as="fetch" href="./model.gltf" >