The most ‘redux-like’ way of handling the pre-loading of data would be to fire off the asynchronous action in the lifecycle method of a Higher Order Component that wraps your app.
The state
Redux Thunk is a middleware that allows you to call the action creators that return a function(thunk) which takes the store’s dispatch method as the argument and which is afterwards used to dispatch the synchronous action after the API or side effects has been finished.
The Redux Toolkit package is intended to be the standard way to write Redux logic.
It includes several utility functions that simplify the most common Redux use cases, including store setup, defining reducers, immutable update logic, and even creating entire “slices” of state at once without writing any action creators or action types by hand. It also includes the most widely used Redux addons, like Redux Thunk for async logic and Reselect for writing selector functions, so that you can use them right away.
The official, opinionated, batteries-included toolset for efficient Redux development.
makes it easier to write good Redux applications and speeds up development
The Redux core docs site at https://redux.js.org contains the primary tutorials for learning Redux, including how to use Redux Toolkit and React-Redux together.