Has the idea to support bulk selecting an area of entities and moving them together been dropped ?

Not sure yet. With the built in cut and paste tools I dont see the need for this. Feel free to convince me if I am wrong

No going to pressure you but ... cut and paste relies on robots which people early game wont have access to. Also all the ores / materials on the belts have to be put into storage.

Using the dolly to select an area and move the group similar to single entity option would make life easier and help my OCD instincts.

for single and bulk move, the new vanilla cut/copy/paste CAN be an alternative and is less "cheaty", but (as billbo already said) it requires to have bots and also moves around lots of items (including thousands or millions of items from chests, warehouses, etc !?). when creating or modifying combinator setups, won't the vanilla functions copy/restore only those colored wires that are IN that temporary blueprint, but lose all wires that connect that group of entities with other (non moved) entities ?

since i prefer nanobots over some mod that gives me bots for the game start to be "less cheaty", and because of the other problems when really rebuilding everything instead of moving, i probably still would need this functionality, also (or especially) when creating new combinator setups.

The use case for this is moving part of a circuit network. Cut and Paste will break connections outside the moved portion. Dollies will keep them, but is currently very tedious to move dozens of objects.

I think it would be a great idea to be able to move multiple entities at the same time! Mainly because of chests that are full of items.

Thanks.

even if you have robots it's still a nice idea deconstructing 500 entities and rebuilding them again a few tiles further with 30 robots takes a few minutes with robots, with picker dollies 5 seconds

The issue because even more transparent if you wanna move more and more entities

Any chance of this being added? It would be a HUGE help for those times when you need to move a chunk of your factory over just one or two cells to make some room.