Referring to people by surname [closed]

I notice that there is a tradition in English of shortening names by omitting given names, which has been formalized in contexts like academia (the theorem of Gauss, the textbook by Young and Geller, citation rules) and law (the firm Baker & McKenzie, the case Roe v. Wade).

Should we really be adopting this practice in contexts where surnames show less varied? For instance, I found that the most common surname is the US (Smith) takes 0.7% of the surnames, while the most common in China (王, Wáng) takes 7.3%.

It's a tradition that probably came about with the advent of surnames. "Baker" was a person who was a baker, with the name applied as a means of identifying which person was meant, ie, identification by their role in the community, and/or to avoid confusion with someone else of the same (first) name. So SURnames were traditionally used to identify people, rather than FIRST names. Regardless of whether this remains best practice, it is a longstanding tradition, and thus considered "formal". That's the best I can figure.

Might I add that it is common in other cultures/languages to have surname (or its equivalent) before first name. I don't know if that then means that citations and the like are then by first name rather than surname, but that would make sense somewhere like Korea, where ~50% of the population has the surname "Kim". It is common in parts of Africa for there to be practically no distinction between surname and first name, such that there is not even any concept of what, to Western peoples, is the norm.

While not, technically, an English language question, I think it is still an interesting question of the relationship between language and sociology.