You may just need to shift your understanding of it.
Scale in parent bones now scale all children as a group, instead of individually. This is excellent for squash and stretch animation techniques, and matches the way many other programs propagate scale. Many users found the old scale very counterintuitive.
The old scale just propagated the scale numbers, which means it just made the child bones scale in their local axes. This can still be done if you branch out each relevant part individually and scale them.
