Okay, after much investigation, there appears to be a fundamental logic flow with item randomization. The randomizer even was able to report light oil barrels as suddenly becoming unreachable mid-way through in the log files (I'm not sure why I don't have that tied to a user-facing message rather than a random log message tbh). Honestly, I'm not too surprised given how intricate item randomization is, but I am definitely surprised it took this long to find. I did a run myself for space age until I unlocked all the planets and had no issues, so it seems to be an uncommon issue at least.
In the meantime, you can cheat yourself an oil refinery (I can explain how to do this) if you still want to continue the run.
Rest assured that there is a probability epsilon above 0% that this will not happen again. Maybe it's 1% though, idk.