From what I can tell auto-entities cards don't take up space in the initial layout calculations. In other words when a dashboard is loaded the card(s) that auto-entities fills are not visible. Then the layout is calculated. All cards being placed. Only then does the auto-entities card load taking up space but not causing the layout to be recalculated creating very odd (and unintentional) layouts.
From what I can tell auto-entities cards don't take up space in the initial layout calculations. In other words when a dashboard is loaded the card(s) that auto-entities fills are not visible. Then the layout is calculated. All cards being placed. Only then does the auto-entities card load taking up space but not causing the layout to be recalculated creating very odd (and unintentional) layouts.