We know for a fact that this is false. For example, the Egyptians were building the pyramids and worshipping their gods at least a thousand year before any known monotheistic religion. The native people of Australia have even older polytheistic religions.
What evidence there is specifically in this case suggests that the monotheistic middle eastern religions were derived from the evolution of a polytheistic belief system into a monotheistic one via a stopping-off point that acknowledged multiple deities, but consistently only worshipped one of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israelites and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh are worth a read, and there are several references to multiple gods in the Old Testament, often in the PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE OTHER GODS BEHIND THE CURTAIN sense rather than as direct callouts, as you'd expect.
So unless we might mean that the sidetracking happened before the archaeological record of Canaanite polytheism starts, it's not really tenable as a suggestion.
I do not say this to devalue or challenge anyone's beliefs today; just that ignoring facts has a tendency not to go well. The moral and personal value of religious belief need not, to my mind, lean on historical record for its validity.