I play vanilla pretty consistently for game testing and you really don't need the UI/qol things. The three mods I miss most are colored mood bars, wall lights, and deep storage. Everything else is just dressing.
Literally in the credits of the game he credits mod authors that gave permissions for mods to join the game. The animals mod author is listed in the art credits. This is just a factually incorrect line of reasoning that is verified within the very game. Tynan has already credited people.
We specifically introduced new code in the recent updates to solve this problem. If you can produce this on unstable without mods that would be awesome. If not I will have to side with TwoTonGamer and say it's a mod issue. The feedback I've gotten from people that previously reported this issue is that the bug is actually resolved.