"Reality" is another taboo word.

Reality is the thing that produces our experience and which we are trying to describe with our models. Stop playing dumb.

If there is a single lesson from QM, it is that looking (=measurement) affects what happens. This has nothing to do with minds.

Yes, looking affects what happens, but that is fully accounted for by the physical process of looking. That is, the effect of looking can be predicted and explained by treating the observer with the same laws of physics as whatever is observed. This does not mean you can make stuff up about unobserved events, or claim that events haven't really happened until they are observed ("For a local observer spacelike separated events do no exist until they come into causal contact with it.").