Can't Write to Public Files but Permissions Appear Fine
Finally managed to solve this. The entire purpose of this cloned server was to test out speed improvements from PHP-FPM. So since PHP evaluation is essentially offloaded to PHP-FPM, it doesn't matter if httpd has permissions, it matters whether the php-fpm process has permissions.

ps aux | grep php-fpm output:

root      5744  0.0  0.3 462268 14988 ?        Ss   16:45   0:00 php-fpm: master process (/etc/php-fpm.conf)
php-fpm   5745  0.0  0.9 467332 35196 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5746  0.0  0.4 466656 16528 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5747  0.0  0.3 466656 14032 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www
php-fpm   5748  0.0  0.3 466656 14028 ?        S    16:45   0:00 php-fpm: pool www


groups php-fpm:

php-fpm : php-fpm


So the ownership of my folder as apache:web is what doesn't fit. I just added the user php-fpm to the group web and changed things back to 775.

sudo usermod -aG web php-fpm


I would love comments on pros and cons of what I see as other possible solutions, especially from a security perspective:

1) Add php-fpm to the 'web' group.

2) Make php-fpm the owner, and httpd as member of web so it can still serve the files later.