Yes. Because it benefited them over others. Humans are capable of choosing to do things that benefit them and it has nothing to do with their "nature". Human nature is to not die and in the ages when humans could barely produce enough food for their own survival, it was beneficial to be in a position of power because it let you control the resources, ensuring you had enough for yourself and maybe some of your subjects as an afterthought. Marxism does not reject the notion that power benefits the people who have then, in fact that's a core fact that Marxism is based on, and it calls out the fact that feudal/monarchist/capitalist power benefits the ruling class by subjugating and exploiting the working class, and proposes that fully collective control of resources will benefit everyone much more equally than the current system. I don't think you have to agree with Marxism's proposed solution to this to recognize the problem it points out. It asserts that because we have lived in such systems our whole lives, we think it's human nature when in reality a person born and living in some other system (Marxist or otherwise) will think their system is human nature, because in reality no system is and they're all abstract inventions with nothing to do with our neurobiology or evolution.

For a non political example, I write code all day because it benefits me and I think it's the most normal and intuitive thing ever, even though I doubt programming was something humans evolved to do, we figured it out ourselves and it had nothing to do with our nature. You literally have to learn and practice abstract computational thinking while learning to program because it's very unintuitive at times compared to how humans think by default, yet people learn it just fine and once you do, it becomes your nature.

The cool thing about humans is we're not bound to natural instincts and can choose to live however we want. I think we should leverage this ability instead of using it as a justification for maintaining the same broken systems that have let us down over and over again.