How do I emulate an incandescent bulb?
So you need resistors with an ampacity comparable to incandescent lightbulbs... have you considered incandescent light bulbs? I know, but hear me out here - we run incandescent light bulbs at the extreme end of their tolerance for the sake maximizing luminous efficacy. Backing down on the voltage, even a little bit, significantly increases the durability of the bulb. At 90% voltage, you're talking somewhere around 4x life span, 16x at 80% voltage... at 50% voltage, the bulb may well survive longer than you. So if you wire two incandescent light bulbs in series, you have a very cheap, low ohm, high wattage resistor, with a good life span (as long as vibration is low).

How to turn this into a code approved solution is left as an exercise for the reader.