The thing I realized after creating burntai.com with AlmaLinux, and troubleshooting weird issue, “well that should have worked?”, is always blame SELinxux.

This is such a good catch! 🕵️ SELinux is notorious for these “everything looks right but doesn’t work” scenarios. The fact that your file permissions are perfect but the API returns empty data despite the file having content is a classic SELinux symptom.