Thanks guys for your Help.
@Sarahlenker , yeah your right, the fbx is basically just a collection of assets. I ended up ditching the idea of importing the whole thing, even after disabling some features. Still took too long and honestly not worth the wait. btw the material part, yeah I noticed that really helped reduce the time.
anyways what I ended up doing is opening the fbx in Blender and just sending over what I actually need using the Send to Unreal add-on. in case you’re interested the official one isn’t being updated anymore but there’s a forked version that’s pretty stable. tested it with UE 5.4 and Blender 4.4, works great.
so yeah I just transfer to Unreal the asset I need. the cool thing is I can send them as a whole block if I group the assets under an empty parent (which in my case the assets already come with) then tweak the add-on settings to get that into Unreal as one unit. super useful when I wanna keep the full structure without breaking everything into parts.. and then yeah I also import the sub assets I need to build that block if needed. so basically I bring in both the grouped version and the separate pieces. gives me options depending on the use case.