It's not a conspiracy.

It's straight up some of the ways in which various accredited physicists were explaining how and why it does the weird things it does.

Von Neuman arguably started it by correctly pointing out that the collapse could be taking place anywhere between the measurement device to the subjective perception of that measurement.

The latter boundary was favored at the time by people like Fritz London, a five times Nobel nominee.

Eugene Wigner further doubled down on the theory, and has the rare distinction of being one of the few people whose gedankenexperiment eventually ended up realizing the very counterintuitive result it was proposed to explore.

These weren't conspiracy theorists.

They were physicists.

Thinking outside the box and from all different angles to try and understand counterintuitive experimental results.

Some of those theories have since been extrapolated from by popsci and new age circles to claim ridiculous things, but the existence of "quantum stickers" to cure your ills doesn't mean Dirac and Schrodinger were crackpots, and so neither does someone claiming "The Secret" like powers based on quantum theory mean that folks like Wigner or Penrose are conspiracy theorists.

It's a legitimate interpretation with a number of very experienced physicists in favor of it over the years, even if not a popular one.

Considering it was one of the basic labs I did in college physics that pretty much every student has to take, and a significant portion of the classes just do the experiments wrong until they get helped, there's probably just enough familiarity to kinda know what's happening but with major misconceptions.

I mean it can happen with any scientific & technological concept that reaches wide enough in the collective consciousness.