Codeigniter (only) wildcard routes not working in sub-folder

Question

I have this wildcard route:

$route['izvlacenje-2022/(:any)']['GET'] = 'WinnersController/draw_screen/$1';

that works fine locally, but not on the server in the staging sub-folder where it gives me 404 error:

http://project.localhost/izvlacenje-2022/renovate // works fine locally
https://our-domain/staging/izvlacenje-2022/renovate // does not work in staging folder, gives 404

Other, non wildcard routes work fine. For example:

$route['intro']['GET'] = 'LandingsController/index';

https://our-domain/staging/intro // works fine

httacces:

DirectoryIndex index.php

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteBase /staging
  RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|resources|gallery|json|slider|robots\.txt)
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d 
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

</IfModule>

<IfModule !mod_rewrite.c>
  ErrorDocument 404 index.php
</IfModule> 

Also, in the config file I set the index_page value to blank, but it does not work either way:

$config['index_page'] = '';