> There should be an easy and obvious way to display those binary logs
> from the system when it's not running systemd or from another system
> (IE logs copied from another system).

After scp'ing the logs to the remote machine:

journalctl --file copied.log

works, assuming it hasn't been encrypted etc.

yep. can you even access journald logs if you're booted up with a rescue
disk? (genuine question, i don't know the answer but figure it's one of
the things i need to know)

If the journal is being kept on disk, then yes, journalctl --directory /var/journal/ will work.

I'm not terribly happy with the current implementation of journal. Having a structured, fast, searchable, all in one journal is a lovely goal however.