You can still use those tools if you want, just pipe the output of journalctl, and use journalctl -f in place of tail -f. It's faster to filter logs using param

You can still use those tools if you want, just pipe the output of journalctl, and use journalctl -f in place of tail -f. It's faster to filter logs using parameters to journalctl though, as it can use the indexes. Also, systemd writes syslog style plaintext messages to an IPC socket at /run/systemd/journal/syslog if needed for compatibility.