I am aware that flavor $\neq$ mass eigenstate, which is how mixing happens, but whenever someone talks about neutrino oscillations they tend to state without motivation that when neutrinos are actually propagating, they are doing so in a mass eigenstate. Presumably this is glossed over because it is a deep and basic artifact of quantum mechanics that I'm missing, but I'm having trouble coming up with it.

I had some help here where they say

The mass eigenstates are the free-particle solution to the wave equation[...]

but I suppose "why is that" could be a more basic reformulation of my question! Why can't mass be time-dependent in the wave equation, yielding (I would think) eigenstates that don't have well-defined mass?