Binary logs probably makes it easier to enforce a specific field format. With other logging daemons some programs would log timestamps iso 8601 others would use

Binary logs probably makes it easier to enforce a specific field format. With other logging daemons some programs would log timestamps iso 8601 others would use unix time or the locale's timestamp format. Same with log message types (ERROR, WARNING, INFO, NOTICE, ...) and multi-line log messages. systemd is now over ten year old and no one has had any major problems with the binary log format. So I think Lennart proved the doubters wrong.