Referencing prefab in code without using editor or Resources.Load?

I seem to encounter this pattern often, and have not found a clean way to handle it:

I have a MonoBehaviour that instantiates a prefab (e.g. a MonoBehaviour called Fragile that spawns a prefab with a particle system when the object it's attached to is hit). My desire is to avoid referencing the prefab it must spawn in the editor, because then I must manually drag the exact same prefab to the component every single time I add it to an object.

At the moment I'm solving this problem by putting the prefab in a Resources folder, declaring a static GameObject member in my MonoBehaviour, and using Resources.Load in Awake if the member is null. To my knowledge this has the following downsides:

• Once loaded, that prefab is never unloaded since the static reference will remain.

• Resources.Load isn't very fast and could result in stuttering if a number of components wake up that all need to load their static references.

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Other methods I don't think would work well:

• Loading all at startup - this won't scale well.

• Loading as needed at level load time - the idea of having to track what prefabs are used in a level doesn't thrill me.

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Any ideas? I'm relatively new to Unity and I feel there's a gap in my knowledge where the answer lies.