Whilst I've heard this idea said plenty of times by scientists as a way of demystifying the double slit and similar experiments, it doesn't really do justice to the weirdness of the quantum world.

Firstly in the "default" interpretation there's no mechanism or explanation for how an observation causes wavefunction collapse, it's just a rule that it just does that. And the collapse doesn't correspond to a change in momentum of a particle or any other change in classical physical state, but something else entirely.

In the double slit experiment a detector at one slit somehow seems to affect the particle as it leaves the source, before it reaches the detector (so the effect is backwards in time!) And without the detector it goes through both slits at once.