...if my drive is APFS but the copy is not, and if I had to restore my drive, I be installing a filing system other than what I had. My assumption was that CCC meant it did not want to copy an APFS.
Once your drive is formatted APFS the only way to get it back to HFS+ is by
reformatting it, and hand in hand with that is if you
restore to an APFS drive from an HFS+ drive you'll wind up with an APFS volume.
I don't think your assumption is correct, but I've got no idea what the CCC warning really
is about.