Feel like I’m missing or misunderstanding a mechanic in boss fights?

I’m not very far in the game yet, but so far 95% of the game has been trivial on Hard mode. Basic enemies typically die in a couple of hits and never get an attack in, and mini-bosses take a bit longer to kill but aren’t even a minor threat. But then I get to a “true” boss fight with a CP gauge, and their HP and damage are multiplied at least 5x from everything else. If I wail on them with super effective attacks for a few rounds while they’re charging I deal maybe 10% of their break bar.

I kind of limped my way through Titamon, but Parrotmon‘s charge attack one-shot my entire team of resistant digimon while they were guarding. The tutorial seemed to imply that I should consistently be charge-breaking bosses, which explains the crazy high damage when I fail to do that, but I don’t know how to multiply my damage by ten to actually deplete the bar?

From a little googling, it sounds like I’m a bit underleveled (mid-high teens, all champions), but others have said they did fine with similar levels, and even if I were ten levels higher it doesn’t seem like the number scaling would work out to actually do a charge break.

I’m a little hesitant to google more because a lot of the posts I found on the topic were dense with spoilers about other bosses, cheese strats, etc. I just want to know what I’m missing. Do I just need to do a bunch of grinding and enhancing to get to Lv20/25/30? Because that’s fine—I just don’t want to do that and then get annihilated again with 50% higher stats if there’s a mechanic I should be taking advantage of instead.