How to change the order of HTML output of a core block?

The render_block filter works for this – I just tested on a fresh install. However, you’ll have to use the final HTML, so it gets a bit ugly.

The following code will copy the first <a> tag and wrap the copy around each <time> tag in the list.

\add_filter('render_block', function($content, $parsed): string {
        // skip other blocks
        if ($parsed['blockName'] !== 'core/latest-posts') {
                return $content;
        }

        // skip latest posts that don't display the date
        if (empty($parsed['attrs']['displayPostDate']) || !$parsed['attrs']['displayPostDate']) {
                return $content;
        }

        $dom = new \DomDocument();
        // parse the HTML, the @ is required because DomDocument
        // doesn't know about HTML5's <time>
        @$dom->loadHTML($content);

        // get each individual post
        foreach ($dom->getElementsByTagName('li') as $entry) {
                $links = $entry->getElementsByTagName('a');
                if ($links->count() === 0) {
                        continue;
                }

                foreach ($entry->getElementsByTagName('time') as $time) {
                        // clone the first <a>
                        $link = $links->item(0)->cloneNode();
                        // wrap the <time> around that <a>
                        $time->parentNode->replaceChild($link, $time);
                        $link->appendChild($time);
                }
        }

        // $dom->saveHTML() returns false on error
        $newContent = $dom->saveHTML();
        if ($newContent !== false) {
            return $newContent;
        }

        return $content;
}, 10, 2);

However, this does not alter the output inside the editor. Since the block is purely rendered in React nowadays, you’d have to use some of the editor filters for that.

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