We need a possibility to make multiple changes to an entity with one request that results in several "smaller" edits in the backend (and is visible as multiple edits in the history and recent changes).

While moving towards the new UI layout, we are going to replace individual edit toolbars with just a fex section-edit-toolbars which makes it possible in the UI to edit several parts of an entity at once. It might not be a good idea to do a pile of API requests to wbsetreference, wbsetqualifier, wbsetclaim, wbsetlabel etc.. at once when someone hits save and we might want to use wbeditentity instead.
The disadvantage of editentity is, that the edit-summary will be somewhat useless for huge changes as it will just say "Updated item".
The solution would be a flag in wbeditentity that causes the backend to save individual ChangeOps separately resulting in several edits and thus in several entries in recent changes and the history.
Another approach would be to implement a completely new API module that takes a list of changes (one change would be equivalent to what the "data" parameter in wbeditentity contains) and that saves these changes individually.