This was chosen to be consistent with normal float printing, which too didn’t have the extra zero before Dragonbox was ported:
1e-6 # => 1.0e-6
1e-6.to_s # => "1.0e-6"
1e-6.inspect # => "1.0e-6"
C scanf
and strtof
do not require the extra zero. Do you have any concrete example of external software that requires it?