With something like a pedestal, unless you’re prone, right next to it, it will never be closer than say 1.5 meters - more like 1.8 meters (straight down, usually it would be more with an angle) - for things like this you’re not going to want ultra high def meshes (well, I don’t in my projects).
I’m interested to find out more about the over-all performance and memory consumption of Nanite and high-def meshes - it may be true that a high density mesh without a Normal map could be more efficient in some situations, but I’m thinking it would be more VRAM in almost all circumstances - especially if the normal map has been created small to allow for the fact it’s never looked at close up.
Also, Nanite appears to create Imposters for everything - that means an extra set of textures for them (I don’t know how they are managed, but there will be some overhead involved) - having said that, they could be why Nanite performs so well - a single draw call for the far away meshes.