How to best animate when dealing with hundreds of individual GameObjects?

I am making a 2D top-down game. I allow the player to do their own landscaping, one of the things they can place is water. This is done using bitmasking. However, I want the water to be animated (each piece of water has 4 frames). Not sure what the best option is when dealing with animation on a lot of individual GameObjects. A common scenario will probably be around 200 individual water-tiles.

Should I use Tiled2Unity?
Should I just use Unity's own Animator and have each GameObject play it's own animation on a loop?
Should I do something else?

EDIT: Decided to do animations in a script to minimize repetetive work.

 

I’m no expert on this, but maybe use a shader for the water tiles instead of animation?