That's never worked for me; I must depress the handle enough to actually unlatch the door before I can unlock the charge port. At least one other person has reported the same in this thread. I don't doubt that a slight depress works for some, but perhaps there's some critical range where it works without unlatching and I've never found it, or maybe there's some interaction with the phone-as-key -- and we all know how flaky and variable that can be!
Also and FWIW, since we're griping about this, if I use the app to unlock the charge port, most of the time, after I hit the "unlock" button, the port does not unlock. The options on the app change (IIRC, "stop charging" appears or disappears, but I don't recall which), whereupon hitting "unlock" again does what it's supposed to do.
Overall, this minor annoyance is one of the reasons I usually don't plug in to charge at home unless my range drops below 200 miles (on my 325-mile LR RWD Model 3). It's just not worth the hassle to recover just a few miles of range.