Welcome @richarnaud to the forum. Even with the recent additions of shapes and other goodies, copy paste is the the way to go. No way to align and distribute multiples in the GFUI. Unless there is a feature I missed being rolled out. There have been quite a few lately.
This is where the design software you choose does the heavy lifting. In Inkscape there are several ways to do it with align and distribute of multiple copies. But I prefer the tiled clone tool as demonstrated in the following post, coming into relevance again in the US in a week.