I'm sorry to say this will be the dumbest question ever because my field is law and I'm as far from a STEM person as it gets.
I'm reading up on physics as a general matter of curiosity (and using AI to do it, so imagine the inaccuracies I've internalized without knowing).
I read about quantum tunneling and I say "oh ok no matter is actually matter its all fields and when a particle is super close to a super close barrier, there's a very small but non-zero chance that the part of the 'field' that's past the barrier is where that particle manifests at time of next measurement"
I read about the double slit experiment with light and electrons and which variables determine what happens with the interference, I ask more and I say "oh ok I have a wall with 2 holes like this: I---O---O---I, I shoot an electron smack in the middle like this: I---O--x--O---I, and depending on the size of the holes, the momentum of my electron (and thus its wavelength) etc it looks like in certain cases the likeliest conclusion is my electron lands on the other side of my wall smack in the middle of the two holes (most likely place bcs of the symmetry of the geometry). So basically looks like I shot my electron straight through without using the holes, but in fact the field of my electron interacted with both holes, and the interference pattern makes their middle one of the likeliest places to land"
I keep looking at this (in only the way a layman can, without any of the maths or deep knowledge, and with pure idiocy as my guide). I keep thinking "well damn tunneling cares that my mass is super small, and that the barrier is super thin", "wavelength qualities of matter exhibiting -a la de broglie- seem to care about my mass (as part of momentum) as well" and both of them flirt very closely with heisenbergs uncertainty principal in similar ways to my ignorant eyes.
So my question is: how do we know quantum tunneling isn't just the same thing? i.e. the barrier has to be thin for a "hole" to be likely enough, the particle has to be small (small mass, small momentum) for the chance of "acting like a wave through the barrier" to be likely enough? Has anyone tried the exact setup as we use in labs for tunnelling, but putting 2 holes in the barrier (to localize the probability of the tunneling occurring through there rather than anywhere else) to see if we're getting an interference pattern from it? I imagine there's a way of distancing our slits and playing with their widths sufficiently to make this different from just a regular double slit experiment in some way, but it really feels like quantum tunneling isn't "lol I ignored your barrier entirely" but rather "lol your barrier is so thin it has areas where it's got the equivalent of holes in it in terms of how my field/wavelength interacts, so I just passed through, and if you had 2 holes I would've demonstrated an interference pattern".
Very sorry to waste so many words on what is likely a dumb question, but in my mind they appear so related that it's weird they're discussed in such separate contexts; I bet this is either a case of me being so uninformed I'm conflating things in a way that make no sense, or just stating the obvious things known to all scientists (just doing so badly) etc. but I'd really like to know if someone has the time to make this clearer to me.
Edited to fix typos