As you stated by yourself: “There isn’t much we can do about it”… and that has been proven wrong, by some guy, who invested 2hrs of his freetime as well, and found a very obvious error in the model structure.
And in regards of SKD documentation, it clearly states, that objects with only 1 LOD will be deleted as soon as they only occupy less than 5% of screen size. As none of those models does contain any additional LOD, this is another example of neglecting Asobo instructions.
Don’t get me wrong, I highly appreciate the effort for creating and implementing such models in order to have a more realistic experience. But blaming Asobo for errors done by yourself (or the corresponding developer) is just a cheap way out.