I'm not the architect of journald and wasn't really around when these decisions were made, so I can't really speak authoritatively on that particular topic.
There was mailing list discussion at the time journald was conceived though, you can find it if you look.
https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-journal.html might be a good entry-point.
Well there was an ambition, apparently.
> Performance: journal operations for appending and browsing should be fast in terms of complexity. O(log n) or better is highly advisable, in order to provide for organization-wide log monitoring with good performance
> Minimal Footprint: journal data files should be small in disk size, especially in the light that the amount of data generated might be substantially bigger than on classic syslog.
The mailing list archives are here: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/
It doesn't look like there was an open design review; Lennart Poettering just dropped it in in v38. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-Ja...