Last night i went ahead and pulled the door latch mechanism. It seems like something is sticking in the door latch internals. With the mechanism out of the car I could easily replicate the problem by pushing the latch to the closed position then actuating the lock/unlock lever to replicate locking/unlocking the door. I would then pull the lever that the exterior pulls expecting the door latch to move to the open position. Except that it would not.

I noticed that if I tapped the mechanism on the ground a few times the latch would then release, leading me to believe something is sticking in the latch internals. Maybe old grease gumming up the internals?

I sprayed the mechanism down with brake cleaner for a bit to get the old grease off. After doing this the mechanism started working as expected. I went through the whole routine described above probably 50 times and it worked every time. I sprayed everything with some silicone spray lubricant as well.

Thinking I had solved the problem I went ahead and put the mechanism back in the door, but once I had everything back together it started showing the same behavior and not opening from the outside after locking/unlocking the doors. The only difference is that now if I pull on the door handle repeatedly the latch will eventually release.

So it seems at least part of the problem is that something about its positioning in the door makes it more prone binding/sticking internally.

At this point I'm just going to look into locating a replacement unless someone here has some additional wisdom in what I should try