And if journald goes belly up, no logs for syslog...

As if syslog cannot go belly up as well.

Lets assume for the sake of argument that logind (a new codebase) is about as stable as syslog (anyone of which are several years old, well tested). Layering one on top of the other, you now have doubled the chance of one of them going belly up.

When have you ever seen syslog go belly up?

You are clearly too young to remember. But don't worry journal will get there

That's the entire point. Syslog has years of stability and reliability. You don't just throw that away, especially for such an important role.

Can you assure it is 100% failure proof in all UNIX variants that have one running?

And if syslog goes belly up no logs. What's your point?

So now instead of syslog we have journald AND syslog - we only doubled the risk of something going boom and taking away our ability to log. I don't think that's nice.

You used have one component that needed to fail to start losing logs. Now you have two.

Technically its really just a socket dup