Treating an electron as a particle is the most natural way to understand the operation of devices like an electron synchrotron or a cathode ray tube, though. Not helpful for atoms or molecules though, I agree.
I'm not sure about even the synchrotron, most people have the very incorrect perception that a single electron is being circled around rather than a continuous beam. This is so far from reality where we're doing something like 600 million collisions / second that I question the value of the analogy entirely.
The concept of a single particle as a point charge that isn't really interacting with everything around it is similarly flawed. We learn from a very young age to conceptualize that as the building block of matter, and entanglement as something weird. Instead it's the other way around: a single particle with a pure (unentangled) wavefunction is pretty near statistically impossible.
The concept of a single particle as a point charge that isn't really interacting with everything around it is similarly flawed. We learn from a very young age to conceptualize that as the building block of matter, and entanglement as something weird. Instead it's the other way around: a single particle with a pure (unentangled) wavefunction is pretty near statistically impossible.