It appears the reason that the rules wasn’t apply was due to the options in the tags. /var/www/ is symlink to the the /home directory and as a result of the option FollowSymLinks not being set correctly, some of the contents weren’t getting loaded or loaded at all (depending on where the rewrite cond/rules were placed).
From reading the options allowed in Apache docs, you either have to specify a + or – :
Note Mixing Options with a + or – with those without is not valid syntax, and will be rejected during server startup by the syntax check with an abort.
So all I needed to was modify the following entry:
Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
More info here: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/core.html#options