A little late but if you’re using UE 5.1, you can make the material use the “Masked” blend mode and enable “Dither Opacity Mask” on it. Now if you mess with the Opacity Mask input, the fading will happen more smoothly rather than just being a on/off switch.
By using dynamic material instances, you’ll be able to fade your static mesh via blueprints
Edit: “Dither Opacity Mask” don’t work with nanite meshes for some reason, use the “Dither Temporal AA” node and hook it up with your opacity mask value