Multiple 2D characters with the same animations?

I'm trying to see if there is any better way to go about working with multiple 2D characters. They all share the same animations and are stored in sprite sheets. Originally, and the way I'd prefer have them, is to have 8 characters on a single sprite sheet with 3 sprites moving up, 3 moving left, 3 moving right, and 3 moving down for each of those 8 characters.

There will probably be around 48 different characters, so that's either 48 different sprite sheets or 6 sprite sheets with 8 characters (which is why it's preferred) and a total of 576 individual sprites.

Option 1: Make 4 animations and an animator controller for each character... which is a lot of work, but does allow me to just drag the animator on an object (I think). This seems very unnecessary.

Option 2: Work with a scriptable object and drag those 576 individual sprites into a Actor object that contains a 4 list of sprites, one for each direction. That's also a lot of work, but then I could just edit the renderer of the object and have 1 animator controller and 4 animations (I think).

Option 3: Ask the Unity Community for another option because 2D is such a pain in the neck!

I chose Option 3 because the first 2 seem to be very daunting. I can do editor scripting perfectly fine, I just don't know how I could go about it. If I name everything a certain way, I'm sure I could look through the directory, but I've never done that before.

Any ideas? Any suggestions at all would be very much appreciated!