Erik Darling looks at operators which result in serial plans:
In the past, there were a number of things that caused entire plans, or sections of plans, to be serial. Scalar UDFs are probably the first one everyone thinks of. They’re bad. Really bad. They’re so bad that if you define a computed column with a scalar UDF, every query that hits the table will run serially even if you don’t select that column. So, like, don’t do that.
What else causes perfectly parallel plan performance plotzing?
Commenting on one of his comments, I can name at least one good reason to use a table variable.