I am a huge lover of the social sciences but I honestly think neuroscience is our best bet at a reasonable answer. I think the issue is that our brains function in a particular and predictable way throughout our life. The only times when they dont is when a illness/damage occurs, drugs are introduced, or even extreme situations that drive our brains to adapt by utilizing what it has at hand (neurotransmitters, limiting or creating more receptors, and using specific areas for cognition). I think the first question we need to ask is whether our brains even have the capacity to create experiences described by a subset of a population that experienced near death (heaven, hell, 3'd person, etc).
Yes! Take for example psilocybin, LSD, or heck even weed. Some of the "trips" that are described by these users match exactly some of the experiences that are in this article like out of body experiences, seeing scary or beautiful creatures, being ripped to pieces then reassembled, being whisked away to new environments in an instant, time perception changes, judgement, being born and reborn multiple times, seeing your life in a timeline... Im not trying to say that this woman or anyone who has these experiences were high but that with a minor alteration to the brain that these things are well within the capability of our brain to manifest itself to our consciousness. We have learned a lot of the brain over the past century but are still very limited in our understanding of how it works cohesively together. It is highly complex there are a lot of variability in functioning from person to person.
I guess what I am trying to get at is that it isnt beyond the realm that these experiences are actually just unusual but very natural phenomenon.