The gist is that you define a subpatch within a Wire patch by putting your nodes inside a Comment node with some special text. Hub nodes that don't have an input connection are considered subpatch input nodes, and Hub nodes that don't have output connection are considered subpatch output nodes. You use one script to extract the subpatch from the Wire patch file, and another script to insert the subpatch into a Wire patch file. When the subpatch is inserted, all the nodes are collapsed visually except for input and output nodes.
Is this better than copy/paste + using the "Align..." functions within Wire? Probably not, but you decide.
https://github.com/moldybeats/wire-subpatch