The problem I have with the 'hidden magic' argument is that everything that provides some sort of abstraction is hidden magic, until you take the time to learn about it. For more examples of 'hidden magic', look no further than GCC, the kernel, etc.
So then this boils down to "I don't like new things", which is perfectly reasonable. But make that your argument. Sometimes there's a good reason to change stuff, because the old stuff doesn't work very well.
edit as mentioned elsewhere, logs are persisted in /var/log/journal by default. If your distro doesn't create that on install, then that's where your issue is.
I've happily been using grep, strace, etc to debug issues in both systemd and 'traditional Unix' systems for years.
RTFM
Storage=
Controls where to store journal data. One of "volatile", "persistent", "auto" and "none". If
"volatile", journal log data will be stored only in memory, i.e. below the /run/log/journal
hierarchy (which is created if needed). If "persistent", data will be stored preferably on disk,
i.e. below the /var/log/journal hierarchy (which is created if needed), with a fallback to
/run/log/journal (which is created if needed), during early boot and if the disk is not writable.
"auto" is similar to "persistent" but the directory /var/log/journal is not created if needed, so
that its existence controls where log data goes. "none" turns off all storage, all log data
received will be dropped. Forwarding to other targets, such as the console, the kernel log buffer,
or a syslog socket will still work however. Defaults to "auto".
You just need to have /var/log/journal. This is your distribution/installer failing you, don't blame systemd.
>On Ubuntu 16.04, /var/log/journal does not exist by default. Create it to keep and query events from previous boots.