I didn’t see this until after I posted here:
You can still cycle through these “semi-idle” villagers and select them using the “select all idle” hotkey, but you are correct that the “select idle villagers in radius” doesn’t work with these. From what I’ve gathered from the UI in this game, I’m assuming there’s a difference between “idle” and “having Zs” (or not holding a gathering tool in their hands). Seems like they should be the same ‘villager state’, but at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t…
(I think these should be called ‘lazy villagers’ as they don’t want to be noticed that they aren’t working)
This might also lead to another issue I’ve noticed specifically with the Malians (or anybody gathering from cows) - there’s a lot of funkiness there - If I have villagers gather from sheep, they will go idle before bopping any nearby cows (not in ranches) - however, if the cows are already dead, they will transition from sheep to cow. I know this one might be a tangent of the previous issue - but I think it’s more of a specific issue derived from this one. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a herd of cows hanging around and food-gathering villagers (holding shepherd staves) just standing around them.