Robots can handle it, but there is evidence in the serps that the engines are somewhat disregarding/diminishing footer links that are meant to be, well, footer links… repetitive blobs tech-generated rather than manually chosen for a page.
Obviously there is a danger that an engine will see these repetitive blobs as not genuine, which would not be good for offsite links but would be a disaster for internal linking.
Massive domains need some automation, but if you got less than 100 pages, I would be cautious about making anything that could have a “ignore me” target on it. And if your domain is under ten pages, definitely just do it “by hand”.