Yea, I've taken whole systems with large fleets split across multiple control groups doing different things with maybe 30 total clicks/keypresses to set it up (while paused, generally) and maybe 10 correctional clicks later on. Of course, those weren't close fights, etc. With the autotargeting and the overkill prevention, you can have lots of ships that you never actually give an order to as an individual.
That said, I am intensely interested to know where the game gets high APM, and also which actions/conceptual-things-you-want-to-do require a large number of clicks/keypresses.