I mean the journald format isn’t magic or anything and 99% of what it stores is plain-text. The only issue with “corruption” is that the tooling is bad at handling it. Which is a valid complaint. But in an alternative universe people would be complaining about plain-text because less crashed on any utf decoding issue.

Basically every journald using distro immediately forwards the logs to syslog so you can just pretend it doesn’t exist and call it a day. I don’t because journald’s metadata and filtering is super powerful but nothing is stopping you from just grepping like usual.