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.