Think of actually learning the engine and using the proper presets for foliage/geometry etc. so you do not have to manipulate individual assets?
Though you are 100% correct in that distance has nothing to do with it.
Back in .18 they decided to ■■■■ the engine up and change everything from distances to screen size;
damaging performance for pretty-much everyone in the process.
Biggest issue there being landscapes got the change as well, and size on screen doesn’t work at all for them when components can easily change size based on the overall map size.
There where a distance setting would have retained a more or less similar LOD distribution across changes, you now have to waste your life fully benching performance out and tweaking the value to fractional numbers that make little to no sense / spark floating point precision issues as well.
Don’t worry though, no one at epic cares.
BTW, before someone bit ches.
OFC, the proper way to do LODs is Size on Screen - Distance wouldn’t account for scaling.
The problem is that SOME items should be allowed to be LODd based on Distance - or locked into a Distance Only mode instead. Like Landscape.