I found myself into a similar situation recently. I had ~8 different objects sharing the same material (I simply mapped them to different UV islands in the single UV layout) and tested to see if I would get 1 draw call when all of them are rendered on the screen together or 8-9+. Unfortunately it was the latter.
When multiple objects share the same material and many of them are rendered at the same time ie in a single frame, it should be possible to use one draw call for the material. Maybe another optimization could be done here.
But I’m afraid, that we actually require hardware support for that first. Something that parallels gpu instancing, but likely more complicated, since this time the mesh changes but the material is identical, whereas with instancing both the mesh and the material/shader are identical (except the mesh’s transform). Supposedly it could be done in the near future though.