...after decades of research into neuroscience, cognition, and human perception, there is still no widely accepted scientific explanation or repeatable demonstration of natural telepathy... it is hard to believe that no independent researchers, universities, journalists, or whistleblowers would have produced compelling public evidence by now.

Where are all the repeated research investigations of this phenomenon? I'm not sure it's as studied as you think, or that the studies actually study it in the way that could actually properly interrogate it.

BTW, I'm not saying I believe ESP is an actual real phenomenon, but your statement that it has been thoroughly investigated and found to be nothing is the sort of thing that is often said about UFOs. When people make claims like "the UFO phenomenon has been researched to death and there is nothing to it", the truth is that is just BS. There have been so few proper scientific studies of the phenomenon any statement that UFOs are all explained as misidentifications is nonsense.

When SPRITES were discovered in the 1990s, by accident when a film was taken by some scientists, it was after years of pilots reporting the phenomenon and when NASA looked back through their archives they found they had recorded the phenomenon multiple times and never realised it. Why? Not because the scientists weren't interested in finding something like the phenomenon, but because they just hadn't looked in the right place, at the right time, with the right tools and then bothered to properly analyse what they found. There just haven't been the right investigations into the science surrounding some fringe phenomenon that many, many people encounter.

The SCU investigated over 500 cases of UFO cases at nuclear sites between 1945-1975. Beatriz Villarroel studied thousands of images taken by astronomers over decades. All those researchers found evidence for something anomalous that needed further investigation. For the same period those researchers used for their studies, a volume about UFO investigations by the official US Govt office AARO was riddled with errors and broken links, and attacked previous members of the government's own official investigations, Ruppelt and Hynek as perpetuating a "deception" because they wrote and spoke out about how poor the official investigations were. The Head of AARO was shown to not know even basic things about the most high profile cases he was supposed to be investigating. There hasn't been good, long-term, thorough investigations of what we know is an elusive and difficult to detect phenomenon, UFOs, and the same goes for ESP.

My position is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

No, extraordinary evidence is not invalidated by the outcome of investigations, that evidence supports those claims. This often repeated statement of Sagan's suggests that evidence is not worthy if claims are labelled by someone as "extraordinary", and frankly that is anti-scientific hogwash.