journald is IMO the worst part of the systemd ecosystem. You're better off using it only as a router and not storing any logs in it. The indexing system it uses is slow and provides no control over chatty subsystems - you cannot truncate the logs for just a single identifier. For all the use indexing is doing you will get better performance out of a modern grep like ag or rg. Structure is worth something but it's better off somewhere other than journald.

I would much rather that they had used an existing database file format. Sqlite3 is robust and already present in the default installation of most Linux distributions. Querying system logs with SQL would be cool and likely faster than using the sd_journal API with all it's weird quirks.

I recently put a lot of effort into reducing logging because of excessive writes. It was so much easier when everything had its own log and you could just look at which files were growing.

Systemd is touted as being highly modular. So it should be easy enough to replace the logging module journald.

Why hasn't this been done if it's that terrible?