>>720201838
From what I've read, the distance where NPCs start actively noticing you being close to them and looking at you in vanilla is about 3-6 times bigger than it should be. They should've only stared like that within bumping distance, but something went wrong, I guess. Picrel is how it looks like with a mod that does just that.
Another thing I've remembered is that the eyes are not detailed enough to not give you that psycho stare, which was combined with horrible optimization on release so that most people played on settings low enough to make it especially apparent.