Does shading (smooth vs flat) on blender models have any effect after importing model to the engine

I’m making my first UE asset - model from blender.
In blender model I got some edges that are to sharp for smooth shading and create “shadows”. If I was doing model for animation I would fix that by marking edges as sharp or adding topology.
But I intend to import this to UE. Should I still fix this - does it have any effect later in engine or I will be just wasting my time?

UE will automatically try to do this if there is no packaged info with the asset. You should receive a warning on asset import about this. For most things, it hasn’t been noticeable for me. If you are shooting for ultra-realism, you might want more control over it.

If you are using baked normal maps, you want to keep the smoothing you baked with. That doesn’t matter for tiling normal maps though.