I have the mark unused belt of decon setting enabled

On a few occasions the marked belts have gone all the way through my builds

Is there a way to put a limit of what belts I want auto deconed?

At the moment I’ve got inserted picking up from a belt and putting into a box them more inserters putting onto a different belt to create a belt gap, is there a better way to do it?

The deconstruction will stop as soon as it sees something else "dropping" onto a belt that's not a depleted mining drill. So all you need is a random inserter that picks up from an empty tile and drops onto the belt where you want it to stop.

The "consume all belts" feature was designed for outpost train stops. I'm not sure of a good way to handle it especially early game when mine output belts frequently go into your whole factory.

Maybe gating that feature on robot technology or a special technology would make it more obvious.

Or maybe a setting for "deconstruction radius" set to maybe 150 tiles, like how pipeline extents work. I'm open to suggestions.

I don’t think there’s an easy answer, I’m perfectly happy to use the dummy inserter my suggestion is to have the inserter trick documented somewhere so hopefully other people can see it