This is the standard I use as well. In general, my rule of thumb is that if something is logging error, it would have been perfectly reasonable for the program to respond by crashing, and the only reason it didn't is that it's executing in some kind of larger context that wants to stay up in the event of the failure of an individual component (like one handler suffering a query that hangs it and having to be terminated by its monitoring program in a program with multiple threads serving web requests). In contrast, something like an ill-formed web query from an untrusted source isn't even an error because you can't force untrusted sources to send you correctly formed input.
Warning, in contrast, is what I use for a condition that the developer predicted and handled but probably indicates the larger context is bad, like "this query arrived from a trusted source but had a configuration so invalid we had to drop it on the floor, or we assumed a default that allowed us to resolve the query but that was a massive assumption and you really should change the source data to be explicit." Warning is also where I put things like "a trusted source is calling a deprecated API, and the deprecation notification has been up long enough that they really should know better by now."
Where all of this matters is process. Errors trigger pages. Warnings get bundled up into a daily report that on-call is responsible for following up on, sometimes by filing tickets to correct trusted sources and sometimes by reaching out to owners of trusted sources and saying "Hey, let's synchronize on your team's plan to stop using that API we declared is going away 9 months ago."
Right. If staging or the canary is logging errors, you block/abort the deploy. If it’s logging warnings, that’s normal.
It seems that the easier rule of thumb, then, is that "application logic should never log an error on its own behalf unless it terminates immediately after", and that error-level log entries should only ever be generated from a higher-level context by something else that's monitoring for problems that the application code itself didn't anticipate.