@caseyliss I just listened to the segment on car buying on ATP. When I bought my Impreza in 2018 I used the Three Step Process and I got an excellent price on the car without talking to a salesperson. The approach is similar to what you mentioned but more formalized.
You decide exactly what you want and then email car dealerships for their best prices with no BS. Then you pit the dealers against each other.
The web site is gone but I made PDFs of the 2 pages.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MIdyxGh0vfIRlPFTPp2z6hGETti3Js-i?usp=sharing