Failed to load mods: Error while loading entity prototype "electric-transmission-tower" (electric-pole): maximum_wire_distance must be <= 64

Oh, hmm... Never realised there was a hard limit on that. Guess I need to remove the wire distance setting, then. If the game won't support wires longer than the default, then that option is pointless. Will investigate.

For the time being, though: Have you set wire distance to anything other than 64? Do you have any mods which change wire distance on electric poles?

Well, either way - removed the wire distance setting. Now always 64. I suspect you may have changed wire distance and put yourself in a broken state. My apologies. The new version of the mod no longer stores that value, so it should work even if you'd previously changed wire distance.

tl;dr fixed 1.0.1

There has to be a way around it as quality allows wire distance to be above 64, but good to know for now it is fixed.

I'm honestly not sure how Quality works, though I'll bet it's a runtime modifier of some sort - similar to Beacons. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do at the prototype stage, as any value over 64 throws a compilation error, as you saw.

Due to how the game works, having just 1 pole with a long range will cause large preformance impacts for ALL electric poles, since they'd need to check if any poles are in that range, IIRC.

A potential workaround would be to connect your pole to another pole on a hidden surface, and allow all of the hidden poles to handle the connections.
using scripts to connect the poles could get a little complicated if you want to maintain distances.

I guess that's what the 64 tile limit is for. I don't think that's a problem I can solve on my end. As you noted, runtime scripts for something like this get complicated fast and run the risk of creating orphaned objects.

Having said that, though - is the check you're referring to on-tick / on-time? This sounds like a check that would only need to be made at object creation, possibly while dragging though I'm not sure. If that's the case, wouldn't adding runtime scripts and additional objects introduce more overhead than just taking a hit to initial placement performance? I don't know how this works.