systemd-journald Doesn't start at all

After renaming the hostname, deleting & recreating /etc/machine-id by running systemd-machine-id-setup and rebooting to apply these, systemd-journald came back to life!

Try deleting /var/log/journal in case that there are any remainders from previous restoring attempts. Then set Storage=persistent in /etc/systemd/journald.conf and reboot.

Normally systemd should recreate /var/log/journal during reboot.

If this doesn't help try

mkdir -p /var/log/journal
systemd-tmpfiles --create --prefix /var/log/journal