I don't think you can really improve on this.

You could use a list comprehension, but that can be unclear and hard to extend, depending on the situation. It can be a nice option if most of the parts in the generator can be broken out into functions with their own name, though.

You could turn it into a generator, which can cause some fun bugs (e.g. everything works fine when you first iterate over it, but not afterwards), so IMO that's best used when it needs to be a generator, for semantics or performance.

You could turn it into a generator, then add a wrapper that turns it into a list (keeping the inner function private), or use a decorator that does the same, but it's less clear than this pattern.

So, i'd just learn to live with it.