Why "penalized"? If there's no significance attached to author ordering, why should it matter who's listed first? (I can actually answer my own question to som

Why "penalized"? If there's no significance attached to author ordering, why should it matter who's listed first? (I can actually answer my own question to some degree: the "alphabetical authors" convention is also the norm in my own field of high energy physics. Only after I finally landed a tenure-track job and served on another search committee did I realize that folks from other fields of physics would see my lack of first-author publications as a black mark. But in principle, among those who know the convention, order ought to be unimportant, shouldn't it?)