It looks like in one of the recent builds something changes something about followers. When I returned a couple of mine from missions, they were no longer recruited - one of them who never had a mission before now has missions, the intimidate options that appear for newly encountered NPCs appeared, I was no longer able to shove them around, one tried to run off, unable to see hunger/thirst stats, etc.
However when I talked to them I could still see all of the usual dialogue options, and I could still assign them to new missions in the camp. Looks like they got stuck in some sort of partway-recruited state.
Was on build 10336, and updating to 10343 caused this
After a bit more testing it appears possibble that the issue occurred earlier and only became apparent now. so problem could be cause in behavior prior to 10336, albeit not all that much before