One more thing, when you blueprint or select unapproved ghosts, they will be shown as checkmarks instead of the actual buildings.
You're talking about the list of what's being selected that appears next to the cursor while dragging, right? This is a known limitation...the placeholders are what's being selected, so their icon is shown in the list instead of the unapproved entities.
In theory, I could potentially add placeholder subtypes for each and every entity in the game, which would use the same exact icon as the corresponding real entity... but that would be a super complex solution for what to me doesn't seem to be a whole lot of benefit. And it still wouldn't be perfect...for example if you were selecting a mix of approved and unapproved transport belts, you'd see two separate counts of "belts" in the selection list instead of one. So instead, I just show the grey checkmark so at least it's easy to tell these are placeholders for an unapproved entity.