I think that demand destruction is simply to simple of a concept for oil. A much closer idea would be food our water.
Oil is now as critical to people as food water and shelter.

So I agree 100% that the concept should be minimum operating levels for various types of economies before they begin to fail. The concept of some sort of slow squeeze makes no sense and is not justified by any historical comparison. Societies can restructure to operate at lower levels of oil but since this restructuring itself require leveraging the existing oil infrastructure it doubtful that it can be accomplished without foresight.

The issue is how a complex system decays. Using the Arctic melting as a guide and the collapse of previous civilizations suggests that it happens fast several times faster than the underlying reason the system is decaying.

So for example if we are at say 50% of the current production levels in 20 years we can expect the actual collapse to occur in less than 5 years. The limit on complex systems seems to be how fast the can collapse once they fall into positive feedback but in general they collapse as fast as possible.

As and example the Greenland Ice sheet can only collapse as fast as the ice can move this asserts that the collapse will quickly be limited by this factor. Oil seems to have about a 3-6 month delay factor in its distribution. Thus a collapse of the oil infrastructure is measured over at least a few years given a reasonably slow underlying decline in production. But it seems obvious that its less than a decade and more on the order of years before the society that cannot change collapses.