[bug] In Publish servers, Home model.json is not being fetched and populated on SPA sites

[AChris07]

Describe the bug
With SPA client-side routing implemented, on a Published page, any time a user tries to navigate to the current site's Home path ("/", ie. https://www.example.com/) from any other given page, the model.json is not fetched, causing the page to go blank.

Package version
1.3.11

To Reproduce

1. Populate a given page in a site with a Link (ie. via a custom component)

2. Publish the site

3. Navigate to said page

4. Try to use the Link to redirect to Home

Expected behavior
The .model.json should be fetched, and the page correctly populated with the Home page content

Actual behavior
The .model.json file is never fetched, and the page goes blank

Screenshots
Will be adding these shortly.

Additional context
Based on our initial investigation, it seems this might be explicitly set, as shown here:

aem-spa-page-model-manager/src/ModelRouter.ts

Lines 174 to 179 in 948895d

	// don't fetch the model
	// for the root path
	// or when the route is excluded
	if (!path || ('/' === path) || isRouteExcluded(path)) {
	return;
	}

However, there's no context on why that is, and this seems to be a common enough use-case that should be supported.

[nitin2io]

Any update on how to tackle this problem?
We are also facing this problem when we started URL shortening and for homepage when accessing with '/' it is behaving differently.
Is there a way if we can override ModelRouter.ts so that it handle the browser path with '/' ?

[AChris07]

@nitin2io A bit of a delayed response, but we've ended up setting the home page as /home and using a redirect. That side-stepped the issue and has worked great so far. It'd be great to get some more context on why it's not supported however.