No, in a lookup query you cannot change limit or offset.
Yes, you’re right. In the general case you may have to do this. Note that with a browse query, some of your required includes are possible:
And you may be able to combine some queries - e.g. if you’re looking for tags for an artist, get all of the artist ids first and deduplicate them if needed before performing the lookups, instead of querying each release individually. Of course, if you’re looking for release tags and genres, yes, you’ll have to look them up one by one.