>And we just perceive it differently at different scales. Like with a stroboscopic light, we might perceive things differently depending on how we are sampling

That's actually exactly what's going on with wave/particle duality. Everything's a wave, all the time, but in certain regimes, wave behavior very closely approximates particle behavior. The realization that particle behavior is therefore just a subset of wave behavior is part of the motivation for looking for an omnibus theory that accounts for everything.

Unification is not unprecedented, consider e.g. the unification of the weak nuclear force and electromagnetic forces into the electroweak force.