Environment art pipeline for large scale 3d levels - many static meshes composed of instances better than fewer but larger static meshes?

does that assimilation process work in tandem with occlusion culling?

And this is something different from the Merge Actor tools here, right?:

If I use that Batch tool, for some reason it nukes all the instances and leaves just one per actor (or maybe it just resets the transforms so they are stacked on top of eachother, hard to tell)

It’s a good point about obscuring - this is really a stress test. It is probably more geometry than my scenes would typically have, and definitely longer sight lines.