In a development environment, sure, but in a real forum, I think it would significantly increase the load on the server. How many of the latest topics are loaded at once? I think it’s 30. Instead of one request for every 30 topics per user, you’d then need 31 requests. With 100 users, that adds up to 3,100 requests instead of 100, and if they scroll or look at another topic list like hot, each time there are way more requests than before.
Post Badges comes to my mind as an example for a component that had that problem too, and it only needed one request per post of a topic. Example with requests and a few posts later you see that a plugin was built to avoid this and finally in 2024 support for it in core was added so badge data is included.