I posted this on the subreddit but didn't get much of a reply, so let's try it here:
I got attacked by a minotaur and set up a quick burrow that encompassed my entire fortress (including materials of course) and assigned every citizen to it. It seemed to work well enough and I was able to seal the fortress with a few bridges (A few children were left outside because they were playing make believe and woudln't come in, but hey, not my fault).
Or so I thought, because I realized there was a freaking hole in the ground, probably from cutting down a tree, leading straight into my barebones farming area.
Naturally I asked the dwarves to quickly take down the farm with the intention to build a couple walls to seal the hole... but the takedown remained inactive as I watched the minotaur slaughter all of my livestock (and children).
I decided to build a wall in the passage to the farms instead, food be damned I have enough saved up to last me a few years I reckon... but they didn't build those either. They have materials inside the burrow and like 3 tiles away, I don't see the reason why they wouldn't do it.
In desperation, I suspended the burrow, but they still wouldn't work. I eliminated the burrow... but they still wouldn't work. (I tried re-building multiple times through all of this, of course). Now they just won't work on anything that involves construction. Engraving seems to be fine, though I think mining is also broken?
I've tried this multiple times after resetting the save to figure out what he hell was going on. I tried setting up burrows without the attacker to see if that helped, it didn't. I tried setting up a burrow, leaving it running for a few seconds, and then destroying it, and the same thing happened where all the dwarves suddenly didn't wanna work. (I know this may feel scummy, but my previous fortress fell to a dragon and I accepted that as my fault because I forgot to seal myself properly that time 100% and was unable to even try to construct something before the thing started killing everything).
My dwarves are mostly happy. This happened a couple days ago and every time I experiment with Burrows pretty much the same happens: The game seems to break down and nobody wants to work anymore.
Am I missing something? Did I misunderstand how these things work?