Can wp_query return posts meta in a single request?

By default, WP_Query returns the standard WP_Post objects for the posts being queried. I believe with some clever rewrite and use of the filters given in WP_Query you can add objects to the returned WP_Post objects array.

Will this be performant? In my opinion, it will hurt performance more as you will need to join results in your query as custom fields are not saved in the wp_posts table, but in the wp_postmeta table

Retrieving post meta is really fast and it does not require any extra instance of WP_Query. You can simply call the custom field with get_post_meta(). WordPress was very thoughtful when the custom fields was introduced. They added a cache to cache them, so whether you are querying 1 or 100 custom fields, you are hitting the database once, superfast. For a complete test and explanation, see this post I have recently done on this subject.

In my opinion, the extra database call and the actual time spent is worth it and faster than rewriting WP_Query in such a way to include custom fields in the standard post object returned by $posts

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