After all this time, I still loathe journald / journalctl. This is literally the worst aspect of systemd ever. For 99.9% of use-cases there was absolutely never any justification for ditching plaintext log files in /var/log.

And even if an application really needs something more sophisticated than that, including line breaks or binary data in logs, it could just use some well-known plaintext-based serialization format. For example, it could simply log each log line as a JSON string, so line breaks are escaped as \n and you can't "forge" fake log lines with a line break. Or if it really wants more structured data, it could log each line as a JSON array, or object. That way you could STILL just open it with less(1) and use grep(1) and whatnot. Heck, there's jq(1) these days to parse JSON from the CLI.

I loathe journald.