I agree about dealing with Apple but having updates completely solved for us was a huge deal. We just didn't have the resources to solve this properly.
This was an app offered for free to some customers of the company. If the app had been the main commercial product we would have obviously opted for a better solution than distributing through stores or using Squirrel.
Back in 2018 we needed a server[1] that would notify Squirrel for the udpates. Squirrel worked ok on macOS but it was particularly bad on Windows. I don't remember the details... iirc Squirrel installed the actual executable in some weird folder and users would never be able to find the app if they deleted the link from the desktop.