Philosophy for Pre-K prep?

Howdy, fellow dadditors!

We've recently started focusing a bit more on getting our 5yo "ready" to start school in the coming fall, just curious as to everyone's hits and misses and tailor the transition to best gear up the munchkin. The big motivator for us is that we're trying to ease him into the change rather than having it be fairly abrupt, so we're introducing a schedule that will more closely resemble what he can expect day-to-day, while trying to find the best ways to introduce him to academics. So far we've had a lot of success in letting him guide the educational aspects of each day, and while I try not to let my natural bias towards STEM get in the way, I'm admittedly pretty giddy about how much he wants to explore science!

On the other side of the coin, the recent topic of discussion for mom and I has been that he doesn't really have much of a desire for language at this point. He can communicate well verbally, and I have no concerns about his vocabulary, but the actual alphabet just isn't his jam. I'm conflicted between the "at their own pace" philosophy, and reconciling that between what will be expected of him academically (which is a struggle I had greatly underestimated until it happened!). Granted, I'm at least self-aware enough that I know there's no sense trying to hammer letters into his head, so we've been experimenting with different presentations and activities (Alphabet workbooks, Leapfrog shows, reading books together) but I'm still trying to find that balance of exposure between what we think is important, vs. what he wants to be learning about.

More pragmatically when it comes to the alphabet, I'm also open to any input about breadth vs. depth. When I sat down and thought about it, there are a lot of different aspects to the alphabet that I've always taken for granted: Letter recognition, letter phonetics, writing, word formation... Is there kind of a hierarchy where certain concepts build upon others, or should they all be tackled concurrently? I figure it's probably one of those questions where opinions will be varied, because I doubt there's any one best approach, but I'm curious as to any theories or anecdotes the community would be willing to share.

Thanks!