How to create a working Skinned Mesh Renderer manually?

Question

When manually creating a Game Object and adding a Skinned Mesh Renderer component, it doesn't show anything when it should show my model, even though the model is selected in the settings. When dragging in an fbx asset with animations into the scene, it automatically creates the necessary Skinned Mesh Renderer component, and this one shows the model. Even though my manual settings are identical to the one generated by Unity, it still doesn't show the model unless I copy the settings from the working component to the nonworking one. What is going on here? Is there some settings I cannot see that are getting copied?