Think of the universe as a painting. There’s the image made in paint, and the surface it was painted on. The canvas.
The stars, the planets, the gasses, the matter and energy and even the space between are the paint. What’s the canvas? Is there a canvas? Would the canvas follow the same rules as the paint?
No, the analogy is more that the oscillations are themselves the particles.
The addition of energy into a system would be this hand push. The fact that the particles themselves exist means that they are oscillations in this mesh (with some energy/frequency). Interactions with other particles can add or remove energy.
Definitely these canvas metaphor are just conveniences. Also, I got it from Zee’s “Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell” which is a standard graduate or advanced undergrad level book on QFT.