Sharing this in case somebody finds their static meshes being incorrectly distance culled when upgrading their project to UE5.5+, know that it’s due to this change, where DistanceCullToSphereEdgealways defaults to true. To resolve, just add
[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.DistanceCullToSphereEdge=0
To your DefaultEngine.ini so it computes the sphere origin, instead of the outer bounds and it should start behaving exactly as before.