Hi
I’m not part of the launcher team, but I have seen this a few times when the launcher is not successfully installed for some reason. By far the most common cause is when the launcher is being run from the downloads (or similar) folder directly. It needs to be installed for the update feature to work. This usually involves dragging it to the ‘Applications’ folder on first run. This caught me out many times when I started using masOS.
Failing that, there may be a permissions issue, but why it would run when being downloaded from the website is a bit confusing.