Indeed. The context here is: > As a non-physicist who only knows QM from popular science texts, I always thought that wave function collapse does not require a

Indeed. The context here is: > As a non-physicist who only knows QM from popular science texts, I always thought that wave function collapse does not require any human intervention and that this can be shown. When pop sci treatments explain that any physical system interacting with the apparatus "measures" it, they are just talking about what you call "pre-measurement." This causes a lot of confusion for students.