art9037880 on "[Plugin: W3 Total Cache] FTP credentials don't allow to write to file /.htaccess"

Got a similar error.
Tried to manually update htatstsess, did not help.
Then, when checking for compatibility (button "compability check") noticed one strange thing - it does not see the absolute path to the file. Ie: /home1/.../public_html/.htaccess and tries to write to a file in the root of the server.