Lo-Fi Games

They should be able to "replenish" their inventories for first needings, like always have meds if there are any available around, clothing maybe too. Food? Npcs run out of stuff when they have chests full of goodies. Nice for them, nice for cutting things available to players.
Might be limited to own building/faction/squad, items could have a tag to prevent npcs pickin them up, or something bound to containers.
This could also add some more life to npcs, they could try to steal things, from you or vendors, with determinate conditions to not make it a mess for the "poor" vendors. Maybe just one at a time, like a campaign from a single npc that tries to get something to eat in desperation.

Adding to this, even if npcs taking items they need might be way better, a solution to them running out of meds could be them not consuming items, I saw you already added the random durability to items (can we set it tho at some point?), this makes a good pair.

In the alpha version on the old map. Npcs could indeed pickup items and steal from you.
Unfortunately it also caused the game to crash nearly every single time. So the dev removed it.
So not sure if that level can be readded.

Dammit. xd
Is it known why it crashed?

The Dev's do, but i dont.
But i can tell you the issue must have complicated to try and fix as it was completely removed. Which means fixing it was not possible at that time.