Hello Sean
In your scenario, if a host on your subnet with an IP address of, say, 192.168.1.55 sends an IP packet with a destination address of 192.168.1.255, the behavior will be exactly the same as if it sent a packet with a destination address of 255.255.255.255.
The difference is that with the 192.168.1.255 address, a host that’s outside of the local subnet can send a broadcast to this network segment. The 255.255.255.255 destination will only send a broadcast to the local subnet.
Now some protocols will use the limited broadcast address of 255.255.255.255 simply because they don’t yet know the subnet information (such as DHCP, RARP, and NTP). Other protocols will use the directed broadcast simply because the host sending the broadcast is in a different subnet, and there’s no other way to send a broadcast to another subnet. This is the case for the Wake-on-Lan (WoL) protocol.
So which one is used is determined by the requirements of the particular protocol.
I hope this has been helpful!
Laz