Why is Logger's default level :debug?

I recently noticed that Elixir’s Logger defaults its primary log level to :debug when no :logger, :level application configuration is present.

In Logger.App, the default ultimately comes from this line:

Application.get_env(:logger, :level, :debug)

Would something like :info or even :warning be a more reasonable default?

I bring this up because I ran into an issue where someone changed our log level from :info to :warn and it resulted in log spam. While Logger is pretty good about changing :warn into :warning under the hood, we have some code that goes through :logger.set_handler_config, which doesn’t have that check and just returns an error. If you don’t catch that, you’re left on :debug.

I’m thinking about how to prevent this situation in the future, and while I can add error handling around every call into :logger, I don’t see a good way to structurally prevent this sort of thing from happening again - it seems like it just comes down to “remember to do it right”, which makes me think this is a footgun in Logger rather than something I should be solving.