In the Built-in Render Pipeline, you can use a MaterialPropertyBlock to change material properties without breaking draw call batching. The CPU still needs to make some render-state changes, but using a MaterialPropertyBlock is faster than using multiple materials.
If your project uses a Scriptable Render Pipeline, don’t use a MaterialPropertyBlock because they remove SRP Batcher compatibility for the material. Use different materials for the different properties instead.
Warning: When you access shared material properties from a C# script, make sure to use Renderer.sharedMaterial and not Renderer.material. Renderer.material creates a copy of the material and assigns the copy back to the Renderer. This stops Unity from batching the draw calls for that Renderer.