That's why I'm such a huge proponent of Splunk, by name (and again, no relation, just a very happy user). Because of how easy it makes it to create graphs out of log files, the phrase "Tailing is dead, long live tailing!" is simply not true. After seeing
that power of centralized logging, most people I've talked to are converts (except for the cost). And perhaps that's why tailing is still so popular. Deciding to invest and learn yet another language, especially a proprietary one that your next employer may not use, is a hard choice to make, given how much other stuff there is to learn.
In Splunk, something like "sourcetype=your_sourcetype | timechart count by status" gives you a chart of HTTPS statuses (200 vs 404 vs 503) over time. After learning that the language it becomes intuitive and is a really really powerful when trying to analyze logs because a visual graph is just so much better than tailing log files. If your centralized logging tool doesn't give you same access to graphing as Splunk does, I'm sorry but it's not good enough to replace 'tail'. Splunk really is the state of the art here and I've yet to see anything that's competitive. (But tbh, I've not looked very hard - the only downsize with Splunk is its cost once you get over a certain size.)