In Skyrim does the resurrect command have any downsides?

Question

A townsperson died from a dragon. Will anything bad happen if I use the command Resurrect to revive him? Will the town still think he's not there?

Answer 1

According to the UESP, the town will still act as if that person has died, unless you resurrect them extremely quickly after they died.

Unless you use this command the instant the NPC is killed, the game will still register the target as "Dead" and they will subsequently not be mentioned in dialogue and sometimes specifically referred to as "Dead" during a quest. Adding a tag of "1" at the end (i.e., resurrect 1) will make the target get up instead of vanishing and reappearing, thus allowing them to keep their equipment. If an NPC's corpse has vanished already, you will also need to enable the NPC. Using this on the player character will not dismiss the "Load last save?" screen, and the camera will behave as if you were still lying dead on the ground. However, if you use the resurrect command before the Loading message appears, the player will revive, but the camera will be centered on the feet rather than the head.

Source

Answer 2

There are times when the resurrect command will not allow you to talk to the NPCs you resurrected. Especially with NPCs with quests this happens a lot. Sometimes they would just stand in the spot where they were resurrected.

Answer 3

The only drawbacks are:

Faction NPC's will not act to you like normally when advancing in questlines when revived. This can happen if you kill your spouse and use cheats for a revive and then your spouse doesn't act like one.

Another way according to MrSmooth is [bolded works are the ones that are drawbacks]:

Unless you use this command the instant the NPC is killed, the game will still register the target as "Dead" and they will subsequently not be mentioned in dialogue and sometimes specifically referred to as "Dead" during a quest. Adding a tag of "1" at the end (i.e., resurrect 1) will make the target get up instead of vanishing and reappearing, thus allowing them to keep their equipment. If an NPC's corpse has vanished already, you will also need to enable the NPC. Using this on the player character will not dismiss the "Load last save?" screen, and the camera will behave as if you were still lying dead on the ground. However, if you use the resurrect command before the Loading message appears, the player will revive, but the camera will be centered on the feet rather than the head.