I found out preds in the Valley (maybe all preds in general) have even more janky aspects to their behavior. When pathfinding to the location they find preferable, sometimes they will walk into one another. If their health is 1, it knocks them down for some reason, even though they don't attack, just move very sharply to try and arrive at the preferred spot on the map they are gravitated towards.
Sometimes, if your pred gets knocked down like this and then somebody bumps into them another time, we can see our character from third person in a rather cursed and uncanny way. You can still respawn. I never tried to interact with the pred like this, sorry, I immediately chose the option to get digested just to see if I am out of bounds and everything is ducked. I respawned as intended, so I guess there was no reason to be worried about this. But it seems the preds basically eliminated one another on the map (they were all low, but still, it is impressive to see how they managed to damage each other without attack animations). Also, sometimes the preds who are up, when walking over the defeated pred, will be damaged and fall down too. It literally feels as if collision damages opponents if their HP is low.
Anyway, I hope this helps with the development and troubleshooting too!
And yes, I also experienced this bug when your character suddenly "forgets how to swing their weapon". You can change weapon, you can try and unarm yourself to try and see if bare handed attacks would work, or change location, hoping change of scenery will make the game unglitch, but it all will prove futile (in my case it did). The only fix I found was to get digested and to respawn.