Is it bad to have many mesh renders?

I have a robotic character that I’ve modeled in blender and have found that there are two ways of rigging it. I can either join all the meshes into a single mesh and then parent it to the Armature, or I can leave it separated and parent each object to its corresponding bone. The latter is a much easier approach because then I don’t have to set the weights for each bone/mesh. I’ve noticed however, that if I import it into unity with the latter method, then each mesh gets its own skinned mesh renderer component whereas if it’s all one large mesh, then there is only a single mesh renderer component. I was wondering if it’s okay to have the many rather than just the one? Thanks!

Can’t import normals, because mesh ‘default’ doesn’t have it.