When did journalctl change to volatile without my knowledge?

Did I miss a change notification at some point? I'm used to seeing a significant date range of data from journalctl but upon checking today, well I only see today... Digging further it said I don't have a persistent storage or something setup. So journalctl.conf is setup for "auto" which means that if /var/log/journal doesn't exist, treat it as volatile, but if /var/log/journal does exist, then treat it as persistent. When did this change? I never removed /var/log/journal.... Thanks, Richard