a better way to what?

if you mean the propagation of events, there's a whole category of computer science called distributed systems which replicating data across many nodes on a network... blockchains are one form with a very high level of consistency (nodes all see the same thing), nostr doesn't have a consensus because it's a separate thing, it's the layer of the cake that concerns itself with the actual implementation of distribution - this is commonly known as a "publish-subscribe" system, the model it uses, there are others, like polling and push, also... the underlying systems that power centralised social networks are similar in nature to nostr's design, where data is replicated on demand instead of preemptively

there is many ways that it could be done but i personally favor the idea of relays behaving as caches and forwarding queries to other nodes and caching the results that come back, where relays use other relays as an extension of their internal database, this would greatly reduce the network traffic cost for users as well, but designing an appropriate system is a bit of a puzzle