I’m not a physicist, so I’m unfamiliar with the particulars of how the detectors used work, but as I understand it, possible explanations like the one you suggest were initially considered as more likely than what was actually documented, but that’s where replicability helps out — if one research group observes something baffling that flies in the face of what is understood to be true, then maybe that’s an equipment or experimenter error. Not so much when a particular result has been demonstrated in countless different ways by many researchers, and when theories built to explain the weird stuff have predictive power for other, related phenomena.

Speaking of stuff that quantum mechanics helps us to understand, there are a few really cool examples of where quantum phenomena is relevant in my field of science (biochemistry), I’ll have a look to see if I can find the thing I’m thinking of.