Your way is fine. Many people make it an explicit scalar reverse because it isn't always a scalar context. Take for example:

my $foo = "This is not a palindrome";
print reverse $foo;
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print implies a list context, so reverse will take the list ($foo), and reverse it to ($foo) and print that result. Probably not what is intended. It also can take a while to debug, when the perfectly acceptable-looking reverse statement "doesn't work".

Thus, if you get in the habit of being explicit about your context, you don't get caught.