It sounds like systemd journal is a good thing, especially for early boot debugging. That said, I don't get the proposal to remove the standard logger. Sure, the logs are duplicated...but having important data stored redundantly seems like a good thing. Plus, you still keep the "everything's a file" philosophy, so you can continue to access the log file in situations where accessing a binary is unfeasible or impossible.

The example of a box where /usr is hosed and you only have access to in-memory programs like the shell, is maybe not the best example. Perhaps a more practical one is the need to monitor / alert on certain log entries in a legacy or upstream system that expects to open and watch a file.

As all distros I know of include a log file rotation facility that deletes old system logs after some set period, having duplicated data in the journal and in traditional system log on disk seems like it would be a problem only in special cases.

Cost-to-benefit, it seems to me there should still be a traditional syslog provider included by default.