Yes, a lot of the ideas are not new. Nevertheless, it is currently an active field of research. One of them is "Integrated Sensing and Communication" (ISAC [or ICAS/JC&S/...]).

One idea is to exploit the signal's structure - despite simply trying to correlate the received line-of-sight signal with its delayed copies.

Especially OFDM has a nice structure. You can estimate delays (-> distances) as frequencies along the subcarriers and Doppler shifts (-> velocities) as frequencies along consecutive OFDM symbols. Estimators like maximum likelihood, ESPRIT, MUSIC, and compressed sensing etc. are your friends here for high-resolution results.

Unfortunately OFDM has a problem with large Doppler shifts (velocities). Therefore, people are looking at other multiplexing schemes like OTFS or AFDM.