Tier 2 links pointing at a tier 1 page that is not indexed yet, does it help or not

I keep seeing two opinions on this. One side says tier 2 passes nothing until the tier 1 page is in the index, so pointing links at a page Google has not crawled is wasted. The other side says the extra links give Googlebot another path to find the page and speed up the first crawl.

Has anyone tested it properly, same type of site and similar tier 2 links, one batch at a non indexed page and one batch at a page that was already indexed? I am interested in crawl time and whether the GSC status moved from discovered to crawled. And if you saw no difference, what actually got the page into the index.