a word about encumbrance
if you are playing and you notice your companions no longer want to follow you they just keep standing around unless you manually move them its caused by encumbrance.
if you have the cheat turned on you can still manually move them normally but if they are carrying too much they won't automatically follow anymore.
i solved this by just having my MC encumbered with everything with the cheat on and using misty step to get around.
just a heads up to anyone having the issue where your companions will no longer follow you even when chained together this solved it for me.
I notice the same thing too. When your character becomes encumbered, and you turn the cheat on to move them, they won't follow the leader, even though they are all chained together. My temporary fix was that I noticed if I quick saved the game while all the characters were running/moving, and quick reloaded, then it would fix that bug. But it would just break again down the line. The game has become unplayable and I'll just wait until someone addresses this issue.