I spend hours wondering why my config file and apache settings wouldn’t work.
Then, I ran into a video (after watching many) that describes a step others don’t.
You must enable module rewrite (if it isn’t enabled), and that’s done with the command
Sudo a2enmod rewrite
After many tries, in many servers, I was able to get it to work. I’m not a web server master, at least I didn’t intend to become one, albeit I think I’m able to hold my own after this last website wordpress transfer that included moving from a broken Virtualmin (php7.x wasn’t working properly after running out of room in the boot sector) into a virtual host because of downtime in my physical hosting (I moved offices quickly).