Consider a case of demand deflation where farmers decide they don't need anything any more, stop growing crops in excess of what is needed to feed themselves and sit on productive land like stone toads. I think there would be near-absolute consensus that the situation was very bad.
The same situation but with coal and oil swapped for farmland would be different. I happen to think that would still be a bad outcome, but there is a pretty sizeable environmental lobby that wants exactly that and would call it good. Assuming it happened over a bit of time so that alternatives could be bought on line.
There is a key question here - who exactly should have the power to deny an economy access to primary resources (particularly those linked to land ownership)? Under what circumstances is that acceptable and unacceptable? That is the mechanical underlying issue for why bad employment numbers correlate to bad outcomes.
At the end of the day, reflecting on these issues makes me think we just need a land tax based on an assessed value of land + mineral wealth underneath the land. Something large enough that families have to repurchase their land once a generation. That is the only idea I have that is even a little consistent with property rights. The issue with dropping demand isn't that people are unemployed - I like being unemployed in the classic not-looking-for-work sense. The problem is that people are willing to work and don't have enough to live comfortably but are unable to get raw resources to do so.
The correct solution is to acknowledge that land is maybe the only resource that a human can't fabricate through hard work and then construct a gentle system of rewards and incentives to make sure that resources are deployed.