> However, the systemd journal raw format is binary data and would much rather a plain text log. All things being equal I'd rather deal with human readable files.

It happens to be worse than text logs, worse than just spewing JSON to files, and entirely worse than most binary log formats. Every log line takes several times it would under text, duplicates a ton of info (like writing boot id in every entry) and somehow is not crash-proof (at least every non-clean shutdown gets me journald complaining about corrupt log files).

It's also dog slow in commands that matter (well documented in systemd bugs on github).

It should be just sqlite with some strategic indexes and tables. It's so bad.