I’ve been doing this for decades, too, but I don’t miss having to deal with everyone inventing multiple log hierarchies, different rotation conventions, compression strategies, etc. not to mention all of the other things which systemd removed from daily toil around process management.
One thing to remember is that a lot of people use the testing distribution so they would have seen it before the Debian 8 release changed the default. The debate in the community took ages but one factor in concluding it was that people were using it for years without it being anything like the more hyperbolic predictions some opponents made.
For how long?
I've been around for decades at this point with people telling me how the newest and greatest thing will obsolete everything that came before it.
The best way to look through logs is still to materialize them in as text in a files hierarchy and use find with grep to look for issues.