I have never looked into getting user friendly / mod rewrites on the .htaccess file in Joomla when I am running the site locally under WAMP, but stumbled on this.
https://www.akeebabackup.com/documentation/troubleshooter/prbasicts.html
Basically, click on WAMP server’s tray icon. Go to >> Apache >> Apache Modules and make sure that Rewrite is checked. If not, click on it and wait for the server to restart.