I think this is a bug, i’ve seen it only in the final release (not in the release candidates)
I create a cube, spin it over its Z axis
Go to edit mode, select a surface
For the world orientation use, normal / gimbal or local (problems happens on all).
Now press S X to scale sleceted surface over its X axis, in that normal/gimbal/local orientation
The problem the scaling happens only the world xyz orientation ??
(i’dd like to fill a bug report, but i cannt login into that using my acount.)
I tried to create new blender drawings all had this problem, its not a specific blend file problem
I installed blender from the zip file (so i could easily overwrite the old files).