I'd characterize logs as a poor tool for doing the two tasks people use them for: investigating the state of the server, or investigating execution of a request

I'd characterize logs as a poor tool for doing the two tasks people use them for: investigating the state of the server, or investigating execution of a request. I instead am a strong believer in separate tools for those two tasks. Server state should be exposed through metrics. Metrics have far fewer sharp edges than logs, and it's more obvious how to correctly produce, consume, and alert on them. I've seen (variations of) your 5 action items needed for the logs of every company I've worked at, but they've never applied to metrics. Executions should be exposed through tracing. I'm kind-of cheating here: I expect the traces to have logs attached. But a well-done tracing system, where a developer can add a flag to their Postman query and their request was traced with the debug level set only for that request is a magical thing.