That's not a great solution because I do need logging sometimes, especially to see what processes are doing, I just don't need it persisted.

Unless you set the option in journald.conf systemd/journald will retain logs in an auto-rotated tmpfs.

It does this whether or not a syslog daemon is running. (All messages it captures goes through the journal and then are forwarded along)

You'll still be able to look @ recent logs with journalctl commands.

This is what I do for an IR camera project.

Set up everything how I like it, set root read-only and mount tmpfs in various areas such as /var/log etc..

Oh really? That's awesome then, thanks!