The fact that scalar multiplication doesn’t use broadcasting also means that it doesn’t get to benefit from loop fusion, which can be important for performance when you’re chaining operations.
julia> using BenchmarkTools
julia> let A = rand(100, 100), B = similar(A)
@btime $B .= 2 * $A .+ 1
@btime $B .= 2 .* $A .+ 1
end;
6.234 μs (2 allocations: 78.20 KiB)
1.915 μs (0 allocations: 0 bytes)
Dots are good! You want more of them, not less. 