Me too. My intention was not to dismiss the frustration, but rather explain why the rescue command doesn’t work the way @azaroth asked about, and also point out which additional information to include to help the devs squash this bug.
Just to clarify, whenever I ask about mods, it’s also not to dismiss anyone’s problem or to imply that mods are always the problem, but rather to ask a question that has to be asked whenever a bug is reported for single-player or a private server. If someone reports a bug on official servers, the devs can know immediately that mods aren’t the cause.
Similar reasoning applies to my suggestion to report the locations where the followers were deployed before sinking. I’m not trying to imply that the cause is definitely with particular spots on the map. Rather, providing that information can help the devs try to repro this bug more consistently and reason about the possible causes. Debugging stuff that can’t be reliably reproduced is incredibly difficult.
Right now, there’s no known workaround for it, which makes it extremely serious.
I used to have a public map near the Sinkhole, with 6 dancers placed on foundations in a circle around it. They used to be just fine there, until one of the previous updates – months ago now – was deployed. From that point on, 2 or 3 of them would sink down on every reboot. They would show up on the map, in the exact same spot where they were supposed to stand, but they just weren’t there. I could rescue them, but the cooldown logic made that so painful that I stopped even trying after the first couple of times.
Now, these were just dancers, with bejewelled “armor” set, so I didn’t lose much. Had they been my fighters or archers, I would’ve been even more pissed off.
Long story short, I really wish the team would give this bug more priority. I’m sorry if my remarks made me sound like I didn’t care 
For starters, it would be nice if the community managers acknowledged that they’ve seen it and that they will relay it to the team.