Buoyancy only happens if you use the specific blueprint for it otherwise nothing will break. In theory you can use the material for the ocean in a plane with some tessellation on it if you want to have a small portion of the ocean showing into the scene, otherwise you will still need the C++ portion of the plugin to handle the infinite ocean system, which automatically scales a plane for you depending on the camera position and distance.
If you still think you are uncomfortable doing changes I would suggest picking the free Water Materials available in the marketplace, they have an ocean material which is quite nice, and you can change it to have the coloring we have in the community project by copying the relevant nodes from this to the Water Materials’ ocean material.