Thanks for the survey 
I thought I’d contribute to this topic with the Vedic perspective that I’ve been digging into.
In the Vedic cosmogonies which paṭiccasamuppāda parallels in several ways, Reality is forced to undergo constant birth and death / death and resurrection. It is like a fire: fire needs fuel in order to continue existing. The Absolute that manifests itself as existing reality, in order to manifest its existence, must subject itself to this repeated process of jāti and jarāmaraṇa. Also, the processes which Reality undertakes to maintain existence, and therefore repeated birth and death, is essentially taṇhā: it must realize sexual acts or eat itself like food (very sensual images), consuming itself to experience itself.
Because all reality is monistic, the eater is also the eaten. It divides itself into these pieces and then feasts on itself. Or the fire is the fuel, the husband is the wife, etc. Basically, craving for union with pleasure drives reality to manifest itself and keep itself within existence → birth and death. In the later parts of the Brāhmaṇas and early Upaniṣads, we start seeing how the cessation of this repeated birth and death is the relinquishment of the desire/drive (craving) to cognize and experience things, realized by the fulfillment of monistic self-cognition with reality. Reality itself would recede into the pre-creative, non-manifest state (no bhava) if it stopped all upādāna as well. For the Buddha, the metaphysics are different, but ponobhavika ends when craving ends as well.
The other connection relates to this point. As Joanna Jurewicz briefly discusses in ‘Playing with Fire,’ in the Aitareya Upaniṣad (AU)—which has one of the most clear references to cognitive powers being nestled within 6 āyatanas—the self (ātman) is said to first be born and nourished within the womb of the mother before being born. The passage she references is this one:
It becomes one with the woman’s body (atman), as if it were a part of her own body. As a result, it does not harm her. And she nourishes this self (atman) of his that has entered her. As she nourishes him, so he should nourish her. The woman carries him as the embryo. At the beginning, he nourishes the child even before its birth. When he nourishes the child even before its birth, he thereby nourishes himself (atman) for the continuance of these worlds, for it is in this way that these worlds continue. That is his second birth.
AU 2.2-3
The larger context of this passage is all about the continuation and rebirth of the cognitive/subjective aspect of reality which is ultimately cognizing itself (all ātman). It talks about how one is reborn to continue cognizing things (in worlds—loka—which, as the Buddha also often defines the term, refer to spaces of experience and cognition), and then how true knowledge of reality leads to immortality. All of this is fairly close to Buddhist ideas, but it is highly embedded in earlier Vedic thought and imagery.
Also, for those who may doubt if the Buddha would have been familiar with ideas like these, the paragraph right before this one says that the first birth of the ātman is through the father’s semen (and that the father depositing semen is the first birth). This is of course the pre-Buddhist / Vedic notion of rebirth in which people are born via the semen first, and Bhante Sujato recently made a post about this arguing that this is what the Buddha used the word gandhabba in reference to when speaking to Brahmins right here.
This is not necessarily the most directly related, but there are some connections in that cognitive forces (in Buddhism this is dependently arisen consciousness; in the AU it is a reified cognitive ‘atman’) are established within the womb before being born for the ‘continuation of these words (loka).’ Bhava is related to three loka as you already mentioned. I think bhava is more than just the establishment of consciousness in the womb—it seems to be the establishment of consciousness (via upādāna) anywhere at anytime. This obviously includes the womb though, which is just a renewed-bhava.
Mettā