That part is old news, it's called Head Related Transfer Functions and even using a general HRTF works quite well. I presume you've tried Spatial Audio with airpods, or some similar system?
I've heard of HRTF but dig the name out of my memory to mention it. I'm not sure those are good enough for faking ecolocation though. Don't have an iPhone or EarPods to try spatial audio.
Maybe for slow narrative games but a game with any action like The Last of Us it sounds unusably imprecise and slow, and TLoU is a fairly slow game if you're playing it stealthily.
I’m mostly thinking about real life navigation, when I worked on this the idea was to help blind people get around. But I’m sure lots of interesting games could be made using the technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-related_transfer_function.