It’s even more difficult to understand when you consider than text files are themselves binary logs and given how many encoding they can have they are not even

It’s even more difficult to understand when you consider than text files are themselves binary logs and given how many encoding they can have they are not even trivial ones. People should just call systemd logs structured rather than binary because that’s what they are. Sure it means you need a shim if you want to view them as plain text but it’s not like we are talking about some unfathomable complexity here.