I tried looking into myself to see what was going on but I'm not quite sure how you have it setup. To me it seems like it should work, I don't know how a sprite's height could be nil haha
So I went through my mods to figure out what was causing the conflict and it turns out https://mods.factorio.com/mod/replicating-belts is causing the issue. I was looking through that mod too to see how it worked and why it would cause a conflict but didn't have much time to delve into it.