I think I have found one possible solution, although it’s not ideal.
I can make each mesh a “Rotatable” BP, and set its mesh to what I want and set its parent to the source cylinder. Then on tic have its rotation set to its parent rotation.
This still seems overly complex to me, and changing the static mesh doesn’t seem to update the BP’s visuals in-editor but that’s a separate issue I assume.
It also doesn’t maintain the mesh’s editor rotation because it’s being set on begin play. So clearly that’s not right.