As far as I can tell from the mod page, construction bots are basically disabled in this. Would it be possible to make a version of this that only adds the visual effect without changing anything about the gameplay?

the problem is that im ticking all bots every tick to check if they have something to construct so i can start the animation, the shorter bots exists in the global table the better it is for performance: so i am making them invisible and teleporting them to their destination

a future is planning where there are instead bots from this mod itself (like a construction robot crafted together with a platform foundation), but how exactly that would function is still very much on the drawing board

Perhaps you can take a leaf out of Everbuild's book ( https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Everbuild ) and have bots be normalish, but pause them and the constructed entity placed - triggering the animation at the same time. Once it's done, then you can reactivate both the bot and the entity so that the bot can return back to the roboport.

I'll have to see if i can find a nice way that doesn't compromise on performance

Or I'm going to come here and steal your code for Everbuild.

keep in mind that its problematic when an user has like a blueprint of chests, pastes it and then pastes it again a little further away with overlap: it'll complain about those entities colliding, requiring the used to suddenly need force build or something, its worth keeping that caveat in mind.

but yeah sure steal away, just mention it somewhere it comes from here, all hail the open-ness of the MIT licence :D