Achievements definitely not working. I created a new world in 0.16.0, on normal difficulty, then quickly starved myself by letting my hunger bar drop to nothing. After I lost a few hearts, ate rotten flesh to "save" myself from dying. And the achievement did NOT appear. My last achievement was in August in one of the 0.15.x versions.

The only thing I did was upgrade my difficulty from normal to hard to get some rotten flesh as no zombies were spawning on normal difficulty.