I really don't understand the scenario where binary logging is a problem. journalctl is a command just like, I dunno, gzip, and people are fine with gzipped logs. If something goes horribly wrong with your system, you're not looking at logs with an oscilloscope, you're looking at logs by mounting the disk on some other working OS - whether it's the initramfs, or a live CD, or whatever. You can run gunzip < /mnt/brokensystem/var/log/messages.1.gz from that other working OS to read text logs; you can also run journalctl --root /mnt/brokensystem to read journald logs.
(Not to mention UNIX has log files that have been in a binary format since time immemorial, like utmp and wtmp.)
(Not to mention UNIX has log files that have been in a binary format since time immemorial, like utmp and wtmp.)