m0na

In many cultures, family names are high-entropy and given names are lower entropy (two random people are more likely to share a given name rather than a family name). Under this assumption, the family-name citation trend makes more sense as there is a lower chance of collisions.

For Korean and Chinese names in particular, it's sort of the opposite: family names are lower entropy (e.g. Lee, Wang, Kim) than given names, which drastically increases the chance of family-name collision. I’m a PhD student of Chinese descent, and I share a family name with lots of academic peers in my specific subfield of research, and have even co-authored with unrelated individuals who share a family name with me. Family-name citations are really ambiguous and confusing to me, so I prefer omitting them altogether and using numeric links.