> If you want to call the "Standard Model" merely one among many "popular views" then you can, but that's not what I'd call accurate. No one really disagrees with it. They just have different "interpretations" of why it holds true.

The Standard Model doesn't contain an explanation for the measurement problem, which is essentially what your explanation is touching on, with the claim that everything is quantum and that the electron really doesn't have a definite position in space, rather than us being unable to know its position. Basically you stated a version of the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is very popular, but not the only way of making sense of the wave function.

> When electrons are "in the cloud" (pre-wave-collapse) they're pure probability and so none of them have an actual location in spacetime even if you had some infinitely fast camera to look. They simply don't exist at specific locations. They are genuinely everywhere at once, or stated even more correctly: they don't exist. Only the energy exists.

I think you're mixing things up a bit here. Before a measurement takes place, the movement of electrons is predicted by a deterministic equation, there is no probability. The electron is indeed (described by?) a wave function that has some amplitude at any point in space. My point about "interacting with themselves" was that the Schrodinger equation predicts the possibility of self-interference of a single electron's wave function, which is an observed effect.

I think you're also over-selling the wave part of the duality and disregarding the particle part. The electron doesn't behave entirely like a wave, it also has particle-like properties, such as a fixed mass and a fixed charge.

> There's no electrons flying around. Only electrons that have already stopped. They don't exist until measured.

This is exactly the part that people love claiming as if it is settled, when it is anything but. The reality is that we don't yet know what quantum particles are. If they don't exist until you measure and then they start existing, then you need to explain what a measurement is, which we have no idea how to.

In fact, even the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't exactly say what you are claiming. It is instead claiming that the wave function + the Born rule are a mathematical tool that predicts the behavior of quantum systems with excellent accuracy, and that the probabilities in the Born rule are fundamental. If we accept this fundamental impossibility of predicting deterministically the properties of a quantum system, it follows that it is unscientific to claim that the particles "have" properties that we fundamentally can't measure. This un-existence is then a philosophical argument, not a physical one: it's stating that something that can't in principle be measured can't be said to exist.

Other popular explanations that are perfectly compatible with the Standard Model are:

- the particles are real, and they exist at all positions in space as predicted by the Schrodinger equation, but these results happen in different universes; for some unexplained reason, "classical objects" can only observe one world at a time

- particles are real, and their movement is affected by a real carrier wave; the particle has a definite but unmeasurable location in space and speed, affected by the carrier wave; the carrier wave is the wave described by the Schrodinger equation

- Measurement is a physical process that causes particles to switch from being somewhat indefinite objects described by the wave function to being definite objects described by classical (rather, relativistic) mechanics

Of course, some of these interpretations have their own unintuitive aspects (non-locality), because of the Bell inequalities. There is also super-determinism, that could in principle allow QM to be both deterministic and local, at the cost of statistical independence.

And finally, the Standard Model itself doesn't yet account for gravity, and the current theories we have for gravity do not work with masses that have indefinite positions in space, so there is still room for discoveries that could contradict somewhat the fundamental properties of "particles" as known today (though, to be fair, it is more likely that our theories about gravity are the ones that will need adjustment).