Electron tunneling always baffled me ... And I am an EE :-) ... I mainly design digital systems and haven’t worked at the transistor level in years (I did some memory design early on in my career). I’m hoping to revisit that topic when I retire and start researching a few things that fascinated me over the years :-).
I am not a physicist or in electronics. I just remember a bunch of random stuff. The reason I mentioned this is that “things that can’t happen” happen all the time we just don’t understand it. Hence, the real issue...”where were you when I laid the foundation of the world...”