It's a convenience method for a specific case where the result is already obvious, because it's called on a string literal that already looks like a regex. Any competent Scala dev reviewer would reject code that uses the "r" method on a variable.

If you want a more verbose option, you can import the Regex type and write:

    val date = Regex(raw"(\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})")

And of course, explicit type declarations can further document the code.