It’s funny you mention this Nick Wignall

I was only teaching the neuroscience of reward pathways last month. The research, as usual, is far from definitive. There are two major pathways (the mesolimbic and the corticolimbic) and both play different roles depending on the type of reward. But as you mention, it appears that the primary dopamine hit comes before the reward (in the VTA area) and then further hits arrive via the Striatum (nucleus accumbens) and other areas during various times of the behavioural chain. The deeper you dive, the more diverse the research gets. I aim to write a better humans article on it in the next few months.