From what I can tell, et al. is not about socio-political power*. It's just a necessity for ease and efficiency. In-text citations need to be short to limit wasted space. Otherwise, we'd have lots of text dedicated to unnecessary names. An in-text citation that reads (Perez et al., 2023) is much more efficient than (Perez, Washington, Smith, Iwukuni, Johnson, Patel, Boofy, Yamirez, Tate, Hendrix, Apple, Man, & Gargamel, 2023).
Using 7th ed. APA, the citation entries in the bibliography/references include upto the first 20 authors, so contributors are rarely omitted.
Perhaps being the first author is in many situations, but APA format can't really address that.
It's not like these are written on literal paper. It's the 21st century, There's no reason to save space in digital documents when you can just format them differently.