The only way to change the scalability I have found is to use Live Sync.

When I use the cooked project it reverts back to Epic Scalability settings.

No one ever wanted to reduce the scalability settings inside Aximmetry?

@Buffos: I think those scalability settings are for the editor only. To make it work at runtime you should set it using blueprints or the rendering settings .ini file. It’s the same with screen percentage and console commands. Unreal differentiates between Editor and Runtime (a cooked project is Runtime). This isn’t specific to how Aximmetry works with Unreal, but applies to Unreal in general. 

I discovered what was changing by looking at the logs rather than the project's ini (which is empty).

In my case, dialing down the GI to high gave me the performance I needed.

Here is the blueprint that does it in case anyone needs it

https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/hwjks-d_/

Kostas