People against it are extremely vocal because it is much harder to work around than previous stuff. Don't like PulseAudio? Use alsa directly is fine, I did in my Arch Linux box. Don't like Flash? HTML5 FTW. Don't like systemd? I have to go to FreeBSD altogether.

I like binary logs. They are faster, which is not a bad thing if you have to grep them. And easy to filter thanks to a fix metadata interface, and so on.

journalctl could use some work, but it can just print JSON, and there's jq.

Maybe my dislike for binary logs is because I haven't yet learnt the tooling around them.

I'm familiar with dealing with text files in Linux/Unix land and have built up years of knowledge on doing so. I feel reluctant to throw that away.