> Things were changing without me asking for them and that was preventing me from learning.

systemd has extensive documentation, both in manpages and in higher-level documents explaining how all the pieces fit together. I've generally found it far more straightforward to learn about than the components it replaces.

> One of the most egregious problems was forcing the change from text logs to journalctl binary logs.

You can keep a syslog implementation like rsyslog installed, and you'll continue to have text logs too. And journalctl outputs plain text.