I occasionally have a look for the current state of evidence. It doesn't seem to get much further that, as you say, screams of outrage that rather unsupported claims are not taken as hard evidence.
I am not swayed by attacks on the morals or motives of those supporting NDE's:
"Despite her reputation as a scientist and a medical doctor, bringing in a guy to have sex with your clients is considered unprofessional in some circles, even if the guy wears a turban. When some of the widows developed vaginal infections after these sessions, it looked as if Kübler-Ross's reputation as an expert on scientific evidence for the afterlife was damaged for good.
. If Moody is to be believed, no one near death has had a horrifying experience. Yet, "according to some estimates as many as 15 percent of NDEs are hellish"
making extraordinary claims that can't be disproved won't hurt Dr. Saborn's book or Reynolds's record sales"
Getting all prurient or hinting 'he's only doing it for the money' is
ad hom and not relevant to the debate. It doesn't discount the arguments put forward. Nor does pointing up selective evidence for a particular brand of afterlife discredit the evidence (such as it is) for
some kind of afterlife. But:
"What little research there has been in this field indicates that the experiences Moody lists as typical of the NDE may be due to brain states triggered by cardiac arrest and anesthesia (Blackmore 1993). Furthermore, many people who have not been near death have had experiences that seem identical to NDEs, e.g., fighter pilots experiencing rapid acceleration. Other mimicking experiences may be the result of psychosis (due to severe neurochemical imbalance) or drug usage, such as hashish, LSD, or DMT.
A 13-year Dutch study led by Pim van Lommel and published in Lancet found that 12 percent (or 18 percent, depending on how NDE is defined) of 344 resuscitated patients who had experienced cessation of their heart and/or breathing function reported an NDE
.. her brain patterns, when she was asked to imagine herself playing tennis or moving around her home, displayed the same activated cortical areas in a manner indistinguishable from that of the healthy volunteers.*
It is possible that the soul leaves the body, but it is not necessary to posit a soul to explain these experiences."
Thus the NDE evidence is really not that persuasive. as for the stories:
"Furthermore, NDE stories are now known to a large audience. Thus, when new stories are told about going into the light, etc., one has to be concerned that these stories may have been contaminated. They may reflect what one has heard and what one expects.
One way to avoid contamination of stories has been developed by University of North Texas professor Dr. Jan Holden.* She designed an experiment in which a laptop computer that opens flat hangs from the ceiling with the screen facing away from the floor. Her husband developed a software program that produces a series of animations. If a patient claims to have been floating above her body on the operating table, then she ought to have seen the computer screen and be able to report on what she saw. Dr. Bruce Greyson has apparently been using this protocol for a few years but so far has not reported anything of interest."
near-death experience (NDE) - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
There was a recent high profile story of an NDE subject seeing all sorts of things only a floating entity could see. This seems to remain annoyingly unverified and anecdotal.
"The most ignored facts that NDE cynics gloss over are those that occur in the out-of-body phase of the NDE. There is no way possible that brain chemistry can be argued when a person is verifiably DEAD, yet can tell everyone later what was said or happening down the hall, away from sight and earshot, during the time of resuscitation efforts"
NDE Rhetoric (http://www.nderf.org/NDE%20Rhetoric.htm - broken link)
I have to say that this is the only part of this site supporting NDE's that adduces any potentially real evidence (though still apparently anecdotal) . the rest is just rhetorical attempts to get anecdotal evidence, reversing the burden of proof and dickering about definitions accepted as some sort valid evidence which it isn't.
"One common example is of a woman in Seattle named only “Maria” who claims to have seen a tennis shoe on a hospital roof. The interesting thing about this story is that there is only one witness, and that witness is a social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp who also had an NDE and who feels that Maria's tale was so compelling she started a foundation to study NDEs.."
Debunking Christianity: The Essential Nuttiness of Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Supernatural
I won't review the strings of sites attacking skeptics for not being unquestioningly gullible but just say that it looks like many of these claims supporting (broadly) the theist case only look convincing if one doesn't look too closely or require better than anecdotal evidence.