alt Hacker Newsjournalctl is designed for these use cases and has options to solve those issues. The lazy part here is you not doing any research about this tool before dismissing it as "not best practice", which is exactly what the fuckups who wrote this article did.
We dismissed using journalctl at the very start. We’ve had similar experiences with other CLI tools: the moment you start embedding them inside a program, you introduce a whole new class of problems. What if journalctl exits? What if it outputs an error? What if it hangs? On top of that, you have to manage the subprocess lifecycle yourself. It’s not as easy as it may seem.
You can also argue that sd_journal (the C API) exists for this exact reason, rather than shelling out to journalctl. These are technical trade-offs, doesn't mean we're fuckups