Found the solution!
It's a bit unintuitive to set up, but works so far at least for a relatively simple setup like this. But, as I feared there is NO way to do this with the SDS intact. It just has to be converted. Maybe this is possible with scene nodes, but I don't know how those work so this is my solution for now.
Convert your target and source mesh if it's an SDS.
Click on the Phong Tag of each of them and press "Create Normal Tag". This will essentially "freeze" your Normals on the mesh in the current state, as the Normal Tag overrides the Phong Tag as long as it exists.
Click on the Normal Tag on your target mesh and enable "Fields" in the "Transfer" menu.
Switch to the "Fields" tab on the tag. You should see a "Freeze" layer. This layer is basically the current normals on your mesh as the Normal Tag saved it. Do not delete this, or you will lose all your normals and your mesh will appear black.
Drag the Normal Tag from your source mesh into the fields list. You should see your normals change.
Click on the "Variable Field Tag" layer you just created and switch to the "Layer" tab.
Change "Mode" to "Average". This essentially takes your target normals and changes them so they are an average of all the source mesh normals that are within a specified radius. You can adjust how large this radius is with the "Radius" setting. You want this relatively low, so only a couple of points around your "transition area" are involved. You might not want a smooth transition either, depending on your usecase. In that case you can disable "Distance Falloff"
This entire setup should look something like this:
So what does this do?
Essentially we are keeping our original normals (which is the "Freeze" layer) and are then overwriting the parts that we actually want via the "Variable Tag Field" layer. If this is set to anything other than "Average" it will not work as intended for this workflow. Averaging is exactly what we want here for a smooth transition.
Now let's assume we only want ONE part of the mesh actually having this transition. For this we need to add a little more to the fields. We can, for example, add a polygon selection as a mask below the "Variable Tag Field" layer.
Then a polygon selection like this:
... can mask out the transition to only happen at the base, not at the thin part:
You can add another "Freeze" layer after all of this to "save" this setup and delete the source object, so you don't have to keep unnecessary objects in your scene.
So yeah, this is a bit more involved than in Blender and unfortunately not at all as convenient and most importantly not as non-destructive as in Blender, but at least it's possible. Maybe something Maxon can work on in the future I think this should be part of the Normal Editing toolset with a couple of clicks instead of... this.
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