Wave Warp Affecting Individual Elements - even in precomp and JPEG

I’d like to add a wave warp distortion effect to a bunch of stripes. The blue marking on the attached image is what I am trying to create. However, when I add the wave warp effect, it warps the individual stripes, not the image as a whole (See image). I have tried everything. I pre-comped the stripes (and didn’t have continuously rasterize on - see image); I recreated it in Illustrator and added it as an illustrator import; I even turned it into a JPEG and added it as a JPEG and it still treated the stripes individually (See image)! The JPEG scenario really confused me, as the stripes are “baked” in to the image. I am currently using AE 2026, so I tried AE 2024, and it still did the same thing. Am I just misunderstanding how wave warp works? I would think that with a JPEG, AE wouldn’t even be able to recognize it as individual stripes.