For some reason Unreal likes to work with character meshes facing down y and as a result the meshes themselves are always rotated 90 degrees.
It’s just some weird decision we have to live with. I used to have my characters face down X and it was great since I didn’t have to do any extra weirdness. But now I use the unreal mannequin and essentially decided to also always face down Y, but only for character models.
Within the characters, I still place sockets and things that other objects will align to with x facing forward.