Game shouldn't activelly prevent you from recovering from catastrophe.

Sure, if you messed up somewhere and enter in a death spiral, well that is fine, is part of the game whole design thing.
What is not fine is the game activelly prevent you from recovering.
So during the death spiral, people were starving, and available jobs started to be an issue, key things stopping. My mistake, no issue there.
So since I was not able to keep up with the jobs priority, I paused everything until I needed workers, and made sure the food market had food. By then I had 0 people and a food market full of food, which was hilarious, since I forgot to unpause the hausing and market.
Greate 0 people, what to do? unpause 1 settlement, and 1 food market, go to the map, and adopt 10 people, and try to rebuild from scratch.
Nop, the game activelly prevent you from doing it, you adopt 10 people, you lose the unit, and the 10 people just "vanish", they don't die, they show in the population for 0.5seconds, and vanish to 0 again. I did it 3 times until I ran out of unit, they show up and just vanish. Like why? The initial settlement has the same conditions and they don't vanish
You have the unit to run the light house, and can bring more people from the other city, you have food, but the game just don't allow that to happen.

This is a learning experience and I hope your next play works out better.
You are the captain, you killed your people with poor decisions.
Start over, don't do that again. (I've never experience a 'death spiral'... because I feed and water my people. That is the game.)
Your option to 'recover' is in the auto saves or restart. We don't need a game mechanic to recover from mistakes, it already exists via auto save.

I was in this same situation, but later when I was more into game mechanics I realized is was just my skill issue. The best solution for me was to start over again, and play it more safe until I can deal with certain risks.

lol you guys are completely missing the point.
If you are looking for acknowledgement that I did messed up, I put that in the description already.
What you failed to see is that how the game prevent you from rebuilding with 0 reason. You have food, you have house, you adopt 10 people, there is absolutely no reason for them to desapear 0.5 sec after. Besides is much more fun (and faster) to rebuild from a catastrophe then restart the "perfect world".

This sounds more like a bug than some "in-game punishment mechanic".

https://ideas.captain-of-industry.com/suggestions/735561/comment/805068#comment805068
youngling, it is you who is missing the point
There already exists a "RECOVERY OPTION"
try to keep up... the recovery option is:
SAVE FILES
AUTOSAVE FILES
Gonna try something stupid? make a save. Have a 'recovery' option if the stupid idea is in fact stupid.
The game does not need a new feature (potential bugs) just to save you from stupid ideas or doing something absolutely idiotic... pause the food supply???? wtf were you thinking? If you had a plan you should have followed through with it, not wander off and forget you PAUSED THEIR FOOD!