Oh good to know, I think I may have typed /etc/groups rather than /etc/group, and assumed that it couldn’t find /etc, whoops. I think that might actually get it to work properly–
However I realized how strongly it tries to manipulate permissions, groups, spawning systemd-units, forcefully ensuring state the best it can by clobbering the system-- this is the sort of app that’s probably safer to run in a VM anyhow.
As I installed it in a VM on their intended OS, it still had a few bugs that were misleading me. It failed to assign groups to correct user, and it also assumes that the user had write permissions to the executable folder and /usr/share.
Just a hot mess. Thank you so much for all the help.