Buy put or sell calls on an asset that's highly correlated with the overall economy. This is honestly the least controversial claim the OP is making.
No one knows what's going to happen...
You can go with Dalio's claim that as long as you have 10 hedges that are sufficiently un-correlated, your risk is incredibly low. But even that might not hold up under future unknown conditions.
However, options contracts are a form of derivatives, meaning they are contracts financially engineered to hold a specific correlation. So, you can build perfect hedges using options contracts, which is what they were originally invented for. People just started betting on the markets with them, which created all kinds of risks in the market.