Unfortunately, this installer format is a showstopper for portable installation, such as what Scoop or Pog (my project) are doing.
Both package managers download the installer .exe, but unpack it using 7zip and then run Anki by passing -b path/to/portable/data/dir. With launchers, there’s not really any way to unpack them, so I’ll have to drop support for new versions of Anki, and I suspect Scoop will do the same.
If you want to keep the launcher, could you please at least provide a static .zip for each version with everything necessary to run Anki?
Likewise. As I said above, distros/packages doing #3 won’t be able to just repackage the binaries like they were doing before, but there’s nothing stopping you from building your own venv and distributing that (it’s literally a config file and one or two lines of uv invocations), or building the binaries yourself.