You should start with straight cables and operate the mechanism to reach the poses.
The problem with configuring the mechanism at an extreme pose is that you will draw the wires in the deformed shape. The simulation starts with no stress or strain in the wire. Drawing a bent wire is like taking a wire and putting a kink in it. As you operate the mechanism near that configuration, the kink will travel into or out of the hole and that is not a realistic representation of a real wire.
Use Rigid Bodies for the links. That way, you don't need to worry about meshing the solid, only the contacting surfaces and for those you can use a relatively fine mesh.
Cable280 elements will make contact with the holes in the rigid bodies in the same way that the beam elements do in the model I provided previously.
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