Not particularly knowledgeable in this area so speaking only from experience. On the standard CentOS 7.x systems we have at work the regular log files are available. I frequently
grep(1)/
tail(1)/whatever
/var/log/messages and other log files.
I can rescue a system from a CentOS USB stick and check out the logs using regular tools.
My guess is that journalctl gives the option to easily output in additional formats/methods, and optionally turn logging to a file off.
I find it intriguing that the cloud team at work rarely consider individual systems, there are hundreds of them running a few services. They care about service stability and uptime. Logging into a single machine to check out some logs is probably a waste of time because either the issues is happening everywhere, or the machine in question can be destroyed and rebuilt without majorly impacting the service.
For them they generally want a fairly high-level view of systems, centralised location. For the applications they generally want finer-grained views, but still in a central place.
I've seen people use vim to look at logs and they have always ended up making some mistake where the forget to pass the "-R" flag, or don't know about Read-Only mode, and modified the log (maybe because they were filtering the contents) and accidentally write the modifications out because of muscle memory.
Personally I usually use
less(1) for regular log files (switching to
view(1) if I want more vim-like controls, but often use multiple pipes before) , and
zless(1) for bz2/gz/xz/zip compressed log files.