@Psychotpsactually that is indeed "it". Commodities. That is how the game's autonomy works. What you descibed as "hidden-hidden" stuff you couldn't find.
Your cheat command to search and destroy anything with the word "CivicPolicy" in it probably didn't work because you don't know what they do, and they weren't the direct cause of the issues.
While investigating what the cause of the bugs are and how the NAP system works, I've started to learn a lot more about how the game processes traits, buffs and commodities and how they all work to produce "autonomy".
When a NAP is enacted two things happen:
A) Hidden traits are applied to all sims who live in the area where the NAP was enacted. When you load up these sims to play as your active household, these traits then allow Civic Policy Player Tracking buffs to be added to your active sims. As far as I know, this system is working correctly and the traits are only applied to sims living in the correct areas. I did notice that if a sim also owns a business lot that exists in another NAP district, they also get the traits for that other district too, but I don't think that causes any known bugs. These traits and player tracking buffs (which only appear on actively played sims and not NPCs) only apply modifiers to track affordances (interactions) performed by your sim which allow them to gain influence points when they do actions that comply with the NAP. They don't have any modifiers that add autonomy to them.
B) NPCs in the instance are given temporary NPC autonomy buffs instead of permanent traits. These are meant to allow them to temporarily display NAP behaviour in places they're currently visiting and then when they leave the instance they're meant to stop, because the buffs are meant to be removed. The buffs apply autonomy modifiers which add temporary commodities to the sim that act like timers. When the commodities max out, they trigger an NPC Push Autonomy super interaction which makes the sim perform a NAP behaviour. These commodities are meant to also disappear when the buff is removed (by the game unloading the sim when they leave the instance or you exit).
When you repeal a NAP, the opposite of things described above happens (traits are removed and buffs are stripped from instanced NPCs.
There are two separate bugs which appear to be the root cause of many of the issues being reported:
1) There's a bug with step B described above, when NPCs in the instance are given the autonomy buffs. The game will apply buffs from the wrong zones to the NPCs - it applies the buffs for every active NAP from every zone at the same time. I believe @elelunicy posted about discovering the bugged script code where the game fails to check the correct area. I believe that the intended design is for the game to only apply the buffs which match the current neighbourhood.
2) As @Raynn0124 mentioned, there is a bug where the temporary commodities are not removed from your sim when the NPC autonomy buffs that added them are removed. These commodities are not meant to be permanent. They're not meant to be present on your active household sims. It seems like switching households or exiting a lot in a certain way is causing this to happen (I don't know what the exact conditions are because I've switched households many times over the course of playing and only encountered two sims that were stuck like this vs all the others that were fine).
That's all I've learned so far about how everything works, what causes things to happen and why.
TLDR: my mods fix these things. Google search "simvasion mods" ๐
