It's not a counter argument to journalctl's usefulness being independent of binary logs, right? In fact using that nice tool for querying I don't really care how it stores logs under the hood.
Right, I'm sure you could do the same thing with grep and a classic /var/log/messages - in fact there's probably something to do this already. Or you'd find a gz from the day in question and read all of it. Just happened that I'd recently read the man page for journald and that was something I recalled.