That's kind of the point, it often prioritizes large enterprise needs over the convenience of lone sysadmins. Binary logs are great if you're a large enterprise

That's kind of the point, it often prioritizes large enterprise needs over the convenience of lone sysadmins. Binary logs are great if you're a large enterprise who is paying to have those logs ingested into an elasticsearch cluster, but less useful if you're not at that scale, as one example. Systemd has great support for complicated log collection daemons, but makes it more difficult to just rsync your logs to some other server.