root defaults to welcome to Nginx when using a "greedy" location - nginx

Question

It seems like similar questions have been asked consistently on the site, but despite of browsing dozens of similar questions, none of the solutions seem to work for me.
When I go to mydomain.com, then nginx shows the default "welcome to nginx" page, however, when I visit mydomain.com/whatever/blablabla/whatever then Nginx sends the user to index.php?q=$uri which is the expected behavior.
So the problem only happens when visiting the actual root domain: mydomain.com.
This is my default file:
server {
listen 80;
location / {
include /etc/nginx/include/php;
index index.php;
root /var/www/mydomain.com/current/web;
}
location ~ /(.*)/? {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$uri;
}
}
Under that configuration, visiting mydomain.com defaults to "welcome to nginx" page, but mydomain.com/whatever is sent to index.php as expected.
When I tweak that to, something like:
location ~ /^(.*)/?$ {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$uri;
}
or
location ~ /^.*/? {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$uri;
}
then mydomain.com starts working again, but mydomain.com/whatever starts showing a 404 page. I've tried a bunch of different configurations, but none of the configurations I've tried seem to fully work as I expect.
Basically what I want is pass the whole URL to a front controller, to parse it and take actions depending on the contents of such URL.
If it helps, I want to mimic in Nginx this behavior from Apache:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php
I also have another virtual host:
server {
listen 0.0.0.0:443;
root /var/www/mydomain.com/current/web;
index index.html index.php;
fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
include /etc/nginx/include/ssl;
include /etc/nginx/include/php;
}