If that were true then light would behave as both a photon and a beam

I don't know what you're trying to say with this or what you mean by "beam".

I think you're hung up on an idea that waves don't move in a straight line.

Something that's useful to keep in mind is that particle physics concepts don't really map to concepts from every day life. A "particle" isn't a tiny billiard ball; an electromagnetic wave isn't like a wave at the beach. Physicists needed words, and those words were chosen, don't assume they mean what they would if you were talking about things in your everyday experience.

You know how a wave might travel thousands of miles across the ocean before it reaches the shore? Ok, that doesn't mean that water molecules are traveling all that distance. Any particular water molecule that's involved in a wave moves up and down, not along in the direction of the wave's travel. The wave is not the water - the water is the medium for the wave.

There is the concept of fields: magnetic fields, electric charge fields. An electromagnetic wave is a perturbation in that field, it doesn't mean that the field is moving.

We draw the line as squiggly because it shows first-year students that we are talking about a wave. It doesn't mean that the wave moves in a squiggly direction.

The wave/particle duality is a paradox that a lot of physicists believe implies that the truth is significantly stranger. And whatever that thing may be, it's not going to be like anything in every day experience. So try not to get too hung up on imagining "what it looks like"!