why does it matter that manor lords wanted to control other lands

So at this point there is absolutely no performance benefit from using a single material instead of 30ish? I thought even though the meshes aren't combined they use the same material so there's no new texture to upload to the GPU is that not the case? I thought the biggest performance hit came from 'context switching' on the GPU which meant material swapping. Most of my buildings are below 1000 verts, to be honest I could very easily reuse my code for the grass which automatically culls meshes that are a certain distance away. For example this would most likely break any LODs (I don't have them yet but if I want to implement those I guess combining is out of the question). I thought about combining my buildings together but there are a couple of things I need to take into account. Take frustum culling into account and I have lush, animated grass for about 15 draw calls.

For example the grass is 25 patches around the camera, each patch contains 2500 grass meshes and are combined to a single mesh. I'm using my own take of the Mesh.Combine method for a lot of things like the grass, crop fields and dynamic meshes like walls, fences or bridges.

Why does it matter that manor lords wanted to control other lands