maybe we should just stop citing papers using the "last name of the author" shorthand?
E.g. if I was reading an article and saw (Jmole et al 2020)--and was familiar with the field--I could easily continue on with an idea of what your paper contained.
If you cite using numbers (as is common in my field, engineering), then the current paper becomes a bit easier to read, but you lose the flow if you need to jump back and forth to the references (e.g. what is [0]? oh, it's jmole 2020, oh where was I in the methods?) and need to rebuild your mental model.
The only advantage of citing by author is if people are actually completely unfamiliar with the paper but are familiar with other works by the author and just guess that the work is related and of similar quality, but this is problematic both because it's incredibly unscientific to just accept something based on authority, and if your lead author is a grad student with few publications to their name you probably aren't familiar with them anyways.