This is wrong. Unity has frustum culling enabled by default. You are correct that it only operates at whole model level though.
Occlusion culling in Unity is fairly straightforward. Simply requires a bake. It also supports 'occlusion areas' where you can give it a hint to do a higher resolution occlusion bake e.g. if you think the player will likely be in that area.
Edit: originally misread parent as stating Unity didn't frustum cull by default. Parent comment is correct.