Might be obvious, but you can use mkfs -t ext4 -L /s /dev/sdb
instead of /dev/sdb1 if you want to avoid partitioning a disk that
doesn’t need it. In a world of virtualization it is every bit as easy to
define a specific volume size without doing any partitioning at all.
But should you drop partitioning?
To someone raised on hard-disks with partition tables this is somewhat
counter-intuitive (even feels dirty). One of the many ways a beginner
(like me once upon a time) can destroy a perfectly good disk is to leave
off the number of the partition (ex: /dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdb1).
For this reason, I feel like taking the unnecessary step of creating a
single partition for the entire drive will seem more normal to admins
old and young. I’m not sure I want to encourage people to ever stop
paying attention to the numbers of the partitions just for the
safety-net it provides.
Of course, using lsblk is definitely the way to go to avoid all of
this confusion, but having a partition table might still avoid some
mishaps.
On the other hand, partitions cause bloat because of old conventions about where the partition can begin. Obviously, in a terabyte disk world such things are not that big of a concern, but if for any reason you have constrained on disk space you might want drop partitions all together and just format the volume directly.