I just noticed this similar thing happened to me when trying to use the workbench. I rarely ever use the workbench so I'm not sure when it happened. But when I try to improve my armor now, it zooms out to 3rd person for a few seconds, nothing happens, and then returns me to first person. I tried multiple workbenches but no help. All other crafting benches work fine. Is there any solution or workaround for this? Can I bring up the workbench menu through the console? I was able to find an old save where the workbench still works but it would require me to replay about 12 hours of gameplay.
Just thinking about redoing all that work makes me not want to continue.