Is there a way to query for a list of values belonging to a specific field in a queryset?
Yep! It's not super well documented, but there's a little information about it down in the Advanced Element Queries section of the docs. It would look something like:
  {% set titleList = craft.entries.section('articles').select('title').column() %}

One thing to note, if you're selecting a field value instead of the title, the select parameter will look something like select('field_fieldHandle')