What is a performant approach to sprite rendering for a 2d hex grid in unity?

I am completely new to Unity, and I need to render a hexagon map, so I was playing around with a generated mesh that makes hexagons out of triangles. However, poking around the manual a bit it seems that what I really want is sprites, since the map is 2d and I basically want 2d assets. Suppose I have a bunch of hex tile art in png format. Some are background, and some are objects that I would like to overlay.

What is the right approach in Unity to render this stuff? I don't want to spawn 10k-s of spriterenderers if the map is say 100x100. Is there the equivalent of Mesh where I can add the sprites dynamically, like I do with triangles? Or, is it a good idea to cheat with mesh renderer and textures (using sprite sheet as the texture, and UV coordinate trickery - I haven't tried this yet, not sure if it works). If not, should I generate the giant sprite for the static parts of the map at start of the game, and then just overlay dynamic objects (units, whatever) on top of that (a tutorial or a pointer to relevant classes would be helpful), or is there a better approach.