Cloning production site down to local?

It can absolutely be done using WP-Cli. Do you have SSH access to the remote server/site? If so, I am happy to show you a process I’ve cooked up using rsync as well as just some standard SQL for the database. That’s my preferred way to do it at the moment.

LOCAL server not installing wordpress

You don’t rename the links with .htaccess when using WordPress. Simply go to Settings->Permalinks from your dashboard and select the scheme you want. Going by your sample URL, you could put /%postname%/ in the Custom Structure field to get just the post name.