Related Posts: Multiple Instances, Single Page

I see it's currently impossible to manually initialize and teardown related posts on the client side and instead have to rely on, at best, shortcode placement. What do you think about reworking related posts a bit to allow frontend init without the shortcode present on load and on the homepage?

The use case for us is as follows:
Our homepage lists posts with excerpts. The user clicks a post triggering an overlay containing the full content of the post. I'd like to be able to initialize Related Posts when the overlay is rendered and teardown Related Posts when the overlay is closed.