If I move the die() out of the DESTROY, this becomes a non-question don't you think?

If you don't, then your question is a non-question. ("How do you make Perl not act like Perl?")

The whole point is to figure out why perl thinks we are cleaning up (even though we are in the middle of runtime),

It is cleaning up an object, and you're wrong in thinking Perl think it's in the global destruction phase.

$ perl -wE'
   DESTROY { die "foo" }
   { bless({}) }
'
        (in cleanup) foo at -e line 2.

$ perl -wE'
   DESTROY { die "foo" }
   our $o = bless({});
'
        (in cleanup) foo at -e line 2 during global destruction.
[download]

Sigh. Given how I explicitly ask "how do I cheat perl here", a non-incendiary answer would be
I am not sure you can do this,
not
<THOUGHTCRIME>perl is not designed to do that, turn around ang go back where you came from!</THOUGHTCRIME>

Thanks for the reply annyway

And one way to cheat is to move the die out of DESTROY, and say, into delete. Do you want cheats, or do you want to be told Perl doesn't do that?

When I gave you the former, you said it's stupid. When I gave you the latter, you said I'm being inflammatory.