I've been editing quite a lot of footage in the timeline and the resulting edited clips are all spaced out from one another and I want to remove the gaps between the clips but doing the right click close gap thing is very tedious and I think a waste of time... is there any way you can close all the gaps for a given region or selection on the timeline or is it only possible to close gaps individually?

Only individually as far as I know. Try using the keyboard to speed up the process...the apostrophe key will move you to the next edit point, then Control+G will close the gap. Get into a rhythm with that and it should go pretty quick!

"Select all" the clips in your timeline, drag them into a BIN.

Then open a new timeline - select all the clips in the bin - and drag them to the new timeline.

They'll import from the bin to the new timeline with no gaps.

doing the right click close gap thing is very tedious

slightly quicker tip: just click gap and then press delete/backspace key, much quicker than right clicking each gap and then clicking close gap