Comment #⁨2⁩

Sorry for my limited English expression. I am not very familiar with Apache or Nginx, and I just threw your question at ChatGPT.
Then it told me that, first, you need to check the folder permissions:

Please make sure you have set the correct folder permissions on the server. You can use the following commands to change the folder permissions:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/forge/waterhole.kostka.studio/storage
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /home/forge/waterhole.kostka.studio/public
sudo chmod -R 755 /home/forge/waterhole.kostka.studio/storage
sudo chmod -R 755 /home/forge/waterhole.kostka.studio/public

I was able to solve the issue by creating another .htaccess in the root folder to get the public folder

.htaccess must contain this

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/public/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /public/$1 [L]

If it work drop a like