> Let’s say you’re covering a red pixel with a black pixel. There’s no way that red pixel will in any way “survive JPEG compression” because the compression happens on the raw pixel data; the raw pixel data no longer has a red pixel.

This is trivially untrue for JPEG; JPEG often stores chroma info as 4:2:0, that is at a quarter the resolution of luminance info. In this common case, covering a single red pixel in the decoded form only removes a quarter of the chroma information from its presence (and this is easy to not notice if, for example, the other three pixels that share its chrominance are nearly black).