Binary logs sound like a good thing to me since in most cases I want to just ship them off, and if I don't, a local consumer that can parse is just fine.

Is there something I'm missing?

Yes. The ability to use the giant ecosystem of text processing and piping infrastructure that underlies the entire idea of the unix philosophy. That something besides eyes is required to parse the logs is absurd and unacceptable. And no one on desktop is shipping off logs to somewhere else. That's cargo cult behavior.

How do you "ship off" .journal files? Whenever I do it either the timestamps are off or you can't read the file at all. I resort to `journalctl xyz.journal > xyz.log` and send the resulting text file to outside the system.

It isn't right for server either. I want my server logs to be files in filesystem and readable with standard tools.