> Features don't need utility to exist. It may be a weird state precisely due to the lack of selection on what happens when death is already occurring.
Totally agree.
But if you can't use selection pressure to directly explain NDEs the same way you can with "fight, flight, freeze", fear of the dark, sexual attraction to signs of physical health, etc, and you need to use other things we don't really understand (like how that "coherent feeling" gets created) to connect NDEs with selection pressures, selection pressures aren't really helping to explain things.
It's also not like explanations for NDEs based on some combination of information processing, known cognitive functions and selection pressures have to be 100% "wrong" for there to be better explanations. Cliche example, but the ptolemaic model of the universe actually predicted the observable orbits of the planets pretty well and explained the lack of observable motion of constellations without needing to appeal to seemingly absurd "special explanations" like stars being an enormously huge distance away and "unseen phenomenon" like stellar parallax that was unobservable to ancient astronomers.
All of the basic ingredients in the ptolemaic model like orbits, planets, and geometry were still relevant in the heliocentric model, even though their arrangement was radically different. That could easily be the same for the relevance of information processing, known cognitive functions and selective pressure in relation to a seemingly absurd "special explanation" that ends up proven correct by some as of yet unseen equivalent to a breakthrough observation of stellar parallax.