The new level selector means minimum level displayed, it's not a checkbox. And yes I agree, this is obviously worse than the old functionality. Unfortunately, the devtools team thinks otherwise.

BTW, in Firefox the dropdown selector contains individually selectable levels for various types of console messages. Could it be that none of the chromium's devtools programmers who are responsible for this change ever used Firefox? I dislike Firefox generally, but in this case their solution seems obviously better.

I wasn't aware that it's a minimum level. I have an app that logs 15 errors per second when running in beta (because it's a sandbox, I don't need these calls. That doesn't happen on prod of course).

The described behavior is by design. If your app is logging many log messages, consider a lower level for these (e.g. use console.log() instead of console.error()). You can also use filters in the console toolbar to filter only relevant messages.