One other question - is there an order of processing the
.htaccess in the document root and the virtual host config? Are
they both processed together, or does one take precedence over the
other?
If VirtualHost is the only enclosing scope, it is processed earlier so it has lower precedence in VirtualHost. But many other configuration sections are counter-intuitively merged in later than things in (just) .htaccess: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/sections.html#merging
