I guess you could, but that would be even more steps, and rather complicated ones too. The persistence services are there for a reason…
You could perhaps use somthing like:
https://community.openhab.org/t/design-pattern-working-with-groups-in-rules/20512
But that also reqires a persistence service set up.
If you don’t want that I beleive the only way is to write a separate rule for every single item
rule "Save state of [item name]"
when
Item [item name] changed
then
//Code to save the values to where you want
end
As I said, persistence exists for a reason.
One of the openHAB gurus like @rlkoshak maybe knows another way, but since persistence is used for exactly this, I don’t think anyone has bothered finding one.