I was advised by Minecraft Expert Support to open a ticket here.

Brief description

• When Minecraft.app is double-clicked after being copied into /Applications, a small window with "Updating Minecraft" and a progress bar appears for a split second, then immediately quits. Hence it is impossible to run the game at all.
• Issue persists across restarts and reinstalls
• Log files from ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft are attached at launcher_log.txt and nativeUpdaterlog.txt
• I also note that ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft contains a folder called "launcher" which is empty (including hidden files)
• ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft has no other contents apart from the log files and the empty "launcher" folder.

Steps to replicate

• Download Minecraft.dmg from https://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft.dmg
• Open Minecraft.dmg
• Drag Minecraft.app from Minecraft.dmg into /Applications
• Double-click Minecraft.app from /Applications

Solutions tried

• Standard troubleshooting (reboot system, restart network, etc.) - issue persists
• Deleting and reinstalling Minecraft.app (including deleting ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft folder) and retrying - issue persists
• Uninstalling Java via Java Uninstall Tool (from java.com) and reinstalling JRE 8 Update 311 (from java.com), then rebooting and retrying - issue persists
• Installing OpenJDK via $ brew install openjdk and retrying - issue persists
• Running /Applications/Minecraft.app/Contents/MacOS/launcher directly - issue persists and error message thrown (see stacktrace_launcher.txt for stack trace)
• Running /Applications/Minecraft.app/Minecraft Updater.app/Contents/MacOS/nativeUpdater directly - issue persists and error message thrown (see stacktrace_nativeupdater.txt for stack trace)