The "Peter" bit reminded me:
Years back, there was a viral trend on Dutch socials where women shared a hashtag "I am Peter" to raise awareness that there were more people named Peter in Boards of Directors than women.
Author-date systems create line noise that makes text hard to grok. Numeric systems (with or without footnotes) don't have that problem. Honestly I don't see the point of author-date. If a a paper is really important then it should be referenced in prose, otherwise "(Kowalchuck et al., 2018)" doesn't tell you anything more than "[11]"; you're still gonna need to look it up in the bibliography. And that looking up is actually made harder: finding [11] between [10] and [12] is easier than finding Kowalchuk between Kowal and Kowalski or whatever other names happen to be there.