How to prevent accidental selection of nodes with very large child nodes

Godot Version

4.2.2

Question

So the situation is as follows: I’m making some very large level design adjustments, and I’d like to be able to click and drag and use the marquee to select a bunch of objects and move or delete them. However, there’s an object not included in this that has a very large Activation node (as it should, it needs to be big enough to activate before the enemy is on-screen). If I happen to click inside this activation zone, I automatically select and start moving the enemy instead of drawing a marquee. I’ve tried looking this up but haven’t really found exactly this question being asked.
Here are some possible solutions and why they don’t work:

  • Lock the offending child node/make it invisible
    Only works within the scene of the enemy node itself. Does not work in the level scene (why???).
  • Make children editable for every offending enemy and lock the offending child node there
    Very tedious, also, would not work because this would mean that the shaders on each enemy, normally Local to Scene, will break since instead of being local to their own enemy scene, they become local to the level scene.
  • Use alt+RMB to select each individual object you want to move/delete
    Unfathomably tedious, and not very ideal if I want to move a collection of objects since I will need to carefully reposition them next to each other the way they were before, one at a time.
  • Find the desired objects in the hierarchy and select them, then move them.
    Assumes that objects physically near each other in the scene would be near each other in the hierarchy, which is often not true.

The only thing that works is trying to find a spot that doesn’t randomly hit some enemy’s activation zone and drag a very precise but very long/tall marquee over to the place I want so I can select objects by overlapping their actual origin, but this is itself somewhat tedious and will often require some trial and error. Surely this isn’t the only way to deal with this issue?