I agree, it’s primarily about performance. Personally I get knee pain if I go full gas completely cold, but no pain if I pedal lightly for a few minutes first. I don’t think of that as injury prevention but some might see it that way. I think of it as making the old body ready to go.
They can read the studies without a YouTube video breaking those studies down for athletes. The video description has links to all of the studies being discussed. If the science didn’t matter we’d all still be training from the Eddy B book, because he had years of experience, right?
By the way, I think the feature that the OP would really benefit from is a lap button so the effort could be segmented from the cooldown, if a cooldown is desired.