Hello astroanu! Unfortunately the apache logs showed nothing, it showed that the page was loaded successfully - status 200. The good news is that I found the solution to the problem:

I had to comment out this line at the top of the index.php file in the public folder:

if (file_exists(__DIR__ . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"])) return false;

It was quite a frustrating thing to discover and I am surprised I didn't find this solution somewhere online with all the digging I did. So I returned here to make sure other could benefit from my experience and not get caught up in the same struggle.

Hope this helps everyone!