So I landed on using Type: Automatic which intelligently slices up the sprite sheet into individual sprites for me. Then Pivot: Bottom which places the sprite’s anchor point at their feet in the center of the sprite. This is typically pretty good so I only have to dork with the x-axis when lining up animations.

After creating a prefab variant for my new character, I get to work animating. I attach my sprite as a child of my parent so I’m free to move the sprite around without fear of screwing up my pathing or colliders as the sprite size changes. If I just drop the sprites for the attack animation in, this is what I get: