How do I place repeating groups of tiles efficiently?

For example, I have a background texture that is 2x2 tiles. I'd like to use the rectangle tool to place the tiles like so:

But instead when I select the 2x2 box of tiles and use the rectangle tool to place them, I get this:

I'd prefer not to have to use multiple tileset objects with different tile sizes, and also sometimes the rectangles I want to repeat are not square (e.g. 2x3 tiles.) I would have to create a new tileset object for every size of tileable group I wanted to use, which seems unwieldy.

2x3 example:

For a workaround "Select a patch from the tilemap" helps to be able to essentially "copy and paste" my way up to the area I want to cover, but it still behaves the same way with the rectangle tool