I’d like to bring up a funny anecdote here.
I once spent a solid 6 hours trying different modlists, comparing with whomever I could find, while trying to figure out why pets refused to eat directly after the first follower leveling update. It was incredibly frustrating. I loaded a duplicate database in singleplayer to start testing and the follwers all ate. “Great.” I thought. “I’m going to have to reboot a server and attaching client so many times to get to the bottom of this,” I lamented.
I booted a test server with the same database with no mods and they ate. I tried a clean database and the same pattern held – No mods? Ate. Mods? No eating. So the issue must be some rogue-code with a bad reference to a thrall component or something, right? By conventional wisdom? Obviously its a modder’s fault. I removed mods one-by-one until finally all that was left was Pippi. I went to their discord and politely, albeit morosely, suggested that given they were the only mod l had left loading on that database, its possible that Pippi was somehow interfering with followers’ eating habits. After posting, I sat and thought a bit and concluded that I hadn’t fully tested every possibility yet. I followed a gut instinct and booted up the same database without Pippi, but with some other random mod on it. Sure enough, pets didnt eat.
I came here and posted this:
After tons of testing (literally everything one might think to try - different modlists, .ini settings, fresh wipe, etc) I’ve come to the realization that if you have any mod at all loaded on a private server, minions will not consume food. This, of course, means they cannot reap any of the benefits associated with eating (healing, strength buff, stat gain buff)
Repro:
1.pick a mod and load it on a multiplayer server
2.place the proper food in your minion’s inventory
3.note that no food is consumed from their inventory and that there are no buffs applied in their stats panel
And the response I got from Ignasis?
Hey there,
As is the case with mod, please contact each mod author and inform about this issue so they can work on it.
I then had to struggle to get people to come here and post their experiences so that I would be taken seriously by the devs, who would ultimately come to realize “OH DAYM all of our most populated servers that run mods cant utilize a key aspect of our brand-new follower system because there is, in fact, an internal issue that’s not caused by a mod!”
(not salty still, I promise, but <3 you anyway Ignasis) 
Anyway.
Please read through the rest of these posts here. Ive been running a semi-busy server for a year and a half now. While I don’t expect anyone to know that offhand, and I’m not nearly narcissistic enough to expect others here who I’ve had multiple past conversations with to remember me, please don’t patronize me. Not quite sure why some in this community assume they automatically know better than the next person. I’m sure I’ve done it a time or two as well, but lately you see this kind of anti-productive response all-to-often.
Yes, information is power and should be shared, but I was trying to get the crashlogs and the testimonials because I knew people would dogpile in with a canned response and then walk away and wait for some mystery modder to be found culpable later.
I have already done extensive searching around all over discord and after noticing myself that many posted similar crash logs with disparate modlists and/or NO MODS AT ALL I wanted to get the ball rolling here.
Maybe it comes to pan out that I’m completely wrong here, but now that we’ve identified a strong possibility that there is an issue that is not directly caused by an out-of-date mod, but something going on with baseplayerchar (funcombat controller is also frequently present right before the crashes in my logs) sure I’ll compare modlists.
I suspect (like Multi most recently said) that there might be an actor or component reference that is issue-prone, which is more commonly called in the presence of certain mods. Its a shame that most mods that do anything more than a datatable merge are attaching a component to baseplayerchar… going to be very hard to pick things apart and establish any correlation there.
I’ll note a pattern that I’m only getting semi-frequent (every couple of hours, maybe less) crash instances when I have over 30 connected. Had a crash around 11pm and again at midnight and given that usually my US-based pop stays rather low (15-20 tops) over night haven’t had one again (roughly 10 hours without crashing)
