I faced this same issue a while back.
What I did is wrote a function (I was coding in JAVA…but you could very easily use this idea in any other language which supports HTTP calls) to abstract this complexity.
It basically took a record ID and fetched all data of the linked records.
I coded my own structure to handle this abstraction.
Keep in mind that Airtable has a rate limit on the API.
Its been sometime since I coded this out.
I cant seem to find the code now…will post it here when I am able to find it:)
Cheers to Airtable!