There is absolutely no way for us to tell. It's possible that you have another server running at port 8080 and you're actually talking to that server, not the one you think you're talking to, since only one application can listen to a port on a given host.
Alternatively there's logic in your webapp that you're not aware of that processes those URLs. And I note that you are working from the root context, so for a
Tomcat server, that would be whatever is in
TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ROOT, which by default contains the Tomcat webapp administration webapp.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.