I was annoyed with binary logs until I found cases where compressing logs was literally 10x or more improvement, like if you ran into a bug that just repeatedly spit the same log.

And I know logrotate compresses text logs too but if you're going to compress logs into tar.gz, might as well just make it binary by default and have a nice interface (journald) on top

You know it's not a single binary, right ? Systemd is a bunch of different, mostly single usage, mostly optional, binaries. As far as Unix philosophy goes, Systemd is definitely following the principles, which is not the case for the Kernel for instance.

As for the binary logs, I used to hate it, but then, not having to manually parse logs for filtering is really nice.

I do have my issues with Systemd, but it not following the Unix philosophy is not one of them.

It's not people disliking it that makes no sense to me; everyone has their opinions.

I just can't imagine having the level of anger displayed by some of the most vocal of the anti-systemd crowd.

Richard P. Gabriel, in his essay “The Rise of Worse-is-Better,” expounds on this theme (see Appendix A). His thesis is that the Unix design philosophy requires that all design decisions err on the side of implementation simplicity, and not on the side of correctness, consistency, or completeness. He calls this the “Worse Is Better” philosophy and shows how it yields programs that are technically inferior to programs designed where correctness and consistency are paramount, but that are evolutionarily superior because they port more easily. Just like a virus.

The highest achievement of the Unix-aesthetic is to have a command that does precisely one function, and does it well (...) This philosophy, in the hands of amateurs, leads to inexplicably mind-numbing botches like the existence of two programs, “head” and “tail,” which print the first part or the last part of a file, depending. Even though their operations are duals of one another, “head” and “tail” are different programs, written by different authors, and take different options!

From The Unix Hater's Handbook

(I like Linux, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows)

That's easy: If it's a service reasonably expected to be present on most desktop systems, it's part of systemd or will eventually be.