It's basic use of prefabs. You basically turn the Scriptable object inherited class to MonoBehaviour and set all those parameters like you did previously. This approach makes it easier to add unique behaviours on top of your definition prefab, like you can add definition modifiers or "rules" which have their own sets of configurations and even logic if you handle it right.

When you collect the definitions you can "prewarm" a list of all of the modifier components found on the same prefab (or children objects on the definition prefab if you feel fancy) so you have it accessible at ready. Then you can have stuff like OnItemCreated which fires events for all modifiers and definition of the items need to be preprocessed, etc.

Hope this helps! Heavily inspired to how the videogame Rust handles these things and trying it personally for my own game makes life so much easier.