Yes, it depends on the use cases, in other words what you want to achieve. I normally don’t pay much attention and see what works best very easily. Meaning I’m not always mindful on where the normals are pointing, I just try ALT + S and if the things becomes a mess then I extrude and scale locking an axis.
In other cases I can clearly see the direction of the normals and I go oh, I can scale along thse normals and is going to work fine. So you just develop a sense of just trying it out and not being way too mindful of it, you’re just trying to reach the goal of modeling what you’re after.
