> Sometimes shutting down every piece of your software if that happens is the correct choice, and sometimes it's so far beyond reasonable that it's ludicrous to argue in favor of "every panic is an abort".

Very much this. And even for the same project: in some cases, I'm a fan of employing a quite strict error handling policy in dev environments (crash and burn) and using a more lenient approach in prod (elevated log level). In my experience, this can result in a robust product. Most importantly, this means the decision is not even made by the application programmer, sometimes it's a config thing.