Bugs seem to surround soft pointers, I reported these long ago:
[UE5.2, Bug report] Blueprint soft class pointer broken. reverts to base class.
If soft pointers are not working properly at all, I would probably let actors register themselves to a manager class as “quest relevant” by holding a quest component or something, then instead of using pointers to bind one thing to another I’d use GUIDs which can retrieve a loaded actor from the manager. Manager could be a GameInstanceSubsystem.