Laravel 5: links with ../public/.. are working, but shouldn't

Question

I have a large Laravel / VueJS application. Although it's not finished 100%, everything so far is working as expected. The only problem I have at this point is URLs are working with the addition of the public folder

mydoamin.com/public/the/rest/of/the/url

as well as without

mydoamin.com/the/rest/of/the/url

The question + answer Avoid public folder of laravel and open directly the root in web server did not help that much. I believe it's something very simple I forgot in my .htaccess file?

Here is the content of the ./rootfolder/.htaccess

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://myracediary.com/$1 [R,L]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^public
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

My project

Google and other search engines already crawled these URLs, even though I don't even know where the links to them should have come from in the first place:

Google Result

Additional Info

Although the .htaccess files are similar in my local dev environment (LAMPP) and the production server (Centos 6, Apache), I actually get the desired 404 in my local environment using the paths with the additional /public/ folder, but not in the production environment.

After some playing around I found out that requests with the additional public folder just go past the .htaccess file in the root folder.

I've been trying to add a rule to redirect in the .htaccess file in that public folder as follows: no success though

RewriteEngine On

# Handle redirects if public folder is defined
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^public
RewriteRule ^public/(.*)$ https://myracediary.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Answer 1

Okay took me a while to get behind the whole thing, but here is how I solved it:

1. I changed the DocumentRoot in my Apache configuration from ...myrootfolder to ...myrootfolder/public, which now avoids hitting the first .htaccess file altogether.
2. In the .htaccess file of the public folder, I added my http to https redirect as seen in my initial question.

Result:

Although it would have been nice to smoothly redirect the URLs with the public folder to URLs without, I'm happy to get 404 errors now when trying to open the messed-up URLs.