They cannot until I would manually have them do something and have an action queue. This was the only issue in my game, I ended up cloning the sim via making a twin > deleting the sim(s) with this issue and then putting them on a new save file. This is the only thing that resolved my issue, now I'm experiencing no issues as well (even after adding my mods back) - sucks I kinda need to start them over again skills and etc, but that's okay.
It seems like potentially those sim trays were corrupted somehow from the March 17th update (unfortunately)