To be fair, you're also 'pre-poisoning the well with a slippery slope' to a degree in your first point. The way I read it you're basically saying there "keep in mind we also thought we knew how things worked ones, maybe we're wrong again". But this to me is a giant straw man, if a common one. We did not have a convincing model of how a lot of the world worked in those times. It's not that we thought that there are no germs. We could not see things as small as germs, and we knew at the time that there are limits to how small a thing we can see. Right now we know that there is a limit to how small a thing can be, and arguably we can detect things at sizes comparable to that. There were no convincing and "complete" models of most of the areas of knowledge. The models we have right now leave a lot of room for "unknown", but only in very specific amounts and in very specific places, not every possible unknown.

So the direct comparison is whether the current state of knowledge leaves as much room for telepathy as the state of knowledge a couple of hundred years ago left for germs, and the answer is a resounding no.