I’ve had various combinations of pre/power amplification over the years and I’ve never personally settled on which had the more dominant effect on the overall sound of the system. I’ve sort of got myself in the place that the pre has a larger effect and power is power, but am I wrong?
It depends on the kinds of amplifier and to some extent the speaker load.
Non-budget amplifiers designed for high technical performance (e.g. most conventional solid state designs) will these days have no identifiable audible deficiencies with a reasonable speaker load. The low signal level and consequent low power dissipation means the cost of the circuitry required to achieve this for a preamp is small compared to that for a power amplifier. If a power amplifier is required to deliver high current into a low resistance and/or high reactance this requires beefy and expensive circuitry which is why the amplifiers in budget AVRs are poor in this respect.
If the amplifiers are more audiophile where the objective is not a high technical performance but a, hopefully, more attractive sound than the neutral one delivered by a high technical performance amplifier then it will depend on the amplifiers involved. It really isn’t possible to generalise and one would have to consider what each amplifier does to the signal on a case by case basis.