I’ve been tracing a lot of jpgs and things and they look good but leave residue of sorts of small circular objects of 2-3 nodes each. Is there a way to mass delete these?

Currently no. But using various selection methods can speed up deleting them. Here's info on the various selection methods. http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL ... elect.html

If you need instructions on making all the little paths separate, so that you can select them easier, we'll need to see an example of a traced image. It depends on the original JPG and on how you traced it, as to exactly how to get to them.