I understand that scaling a mesh inside Unreal would also scale it’s UV’s and thus mess up it’s texture too.
What I wanna know is, is there any other disadvantages that I don’t know of? I’m using basic materials with a color hooked up to the base color and that’s it so I don’t really care about texture scaling or anything.
Scaling meshes is fine, literally everyone does it.
Extreme non-uniform scaling is generally best avoided in UE4 if you’re using DFAO (or using the global distance field for other effects such as collision testing) as it can create artifacts (in DFAOs cast). This issue is less of a problem in UE5.
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Scaling collision meshes used in collision testing on dynamic actors can be problematic. Scaling actors that physically simulate themselves can be problematic. Scaling just basic static geometry, however, is totally fine.
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In my opinion scaling imported meshes inside any engine is not performance wise. The engine has to calculate every mesh another time to that scale, caused by unreal/you. That is x2 calls for each mesh inside the runtime calculation. I wouldn’t go for that. However, internal primitives, like the box, cylinder, sphere etc. can be scaled at any time. The “scale” here is nothing more than the initial value you change. Hope that makes sense 
There’s no difference there. You presumably translate and rotate the mesh, the scale is just baked into that matrix, so there’s no extra cost.
They are handled on the graphics card exactly the same as externally imported meshes. (Unless you’re talking about BSP geometry, which is a totally different kettle of fish!)