Of course that's their idea, The Mac Store has been a moderate failure, so now they are pushing people into it slowly more and more every release.
As Apple and Microsoft (with their Windows Store) have learned, if there's a real choice between an app store and a standard install, nobody will pick the app store. They cannot promote it naturally, they have to push it through by force.
People went as far as disabling all windows updates manually.
Also as a second point, you can totally have a software updater without an app store.
I don't have any particular problems with the rental model but in this case I had bought it on the basis of it not being that.
Apple themselves ships some software, like the non-Mac App Store versions of Xcode, as xips (signed zips), but for some reason decided 3rd party developers cannot use these.
Apples recommendations are in the "Shipping your Signed Code" section of this tech note:
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/technotes/tn2206...
Now I remember seeing these weird long paths pointing to weird places with the word translocation in them — never really dug into the why. I've also seen apps ask to move themselves to /Applications when launched from ~/Downloads.
Anyway, with all these Gatekeeper changes, it's almost as if Apple doesn't want non-app-store apps at all.