I've never successfully run the game on macOS. From the smattering of reports here (including my own), I *think* the issue is that the JRE lib folder is incomplete or incorrectly set up.
Yeah, this is at least part of the problem. The bundle that Itch downloads appears to be corrupt beyond that, but with the manual download of the .rar, I was able to replace the JRE in the bundle with a JRE download from https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre8-downloads-2133155.... and it ran