I think you are confusing "windows like" with "user-friendly". A "bespoke archive, that you find on some developer's website, that you extract and somewhere it contains an executable and assets, that you move where you want to keep them, and then the user remembers to manually update it sometimes somehow" is not how you usually do stuff on Linux and is not even user-friendly.

Distributions come with programs like "gnome software" or "kde discover" that allows the user to graphically install programs from the distro's package manager, or from flatpak or snap. It will also help them to keep them updated and to manage dependencies. That is user-friendly.

I suggest using flatpak. It will work on almost all distros out of the box and will be easy to install and maintain for the user. If flatpak is too "bloated" for you because it uses containers, then you need to package it for every distro manually, but that's a lot of work. If it's something that just needs to be used once and never again, consider an appimage or a script, because they don't need to be installed.

Distros are different operating systems, it's not gonna be easy to package for all of them without compromises.

Also, if you really really really need to use your bespoke archive, you can do like native steam games do, and put every library you link in the archive, and link with relative paths instead of system wide paths, or with a launch script that loads your provided libraries. But that's not a great user experience. Steam gets away with it because it's the launcher that manages the whole thing.