Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no, publishing to the Mac AppStore is a slightly different beast. https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/4415 TBF I wouldn't bother with the Mac AppStore if there was a simple way of distributing paid versions of the desktop app without much coding involved.
You could check out the combination of Conveyor and Stripe: https://hydraulic.software/ Conveyor solves out-of-store distribution and update (albeit, it's not been tested with Tauri specifically yet). You can then have the app check for a license on startup. Stripe integration isn't a lot of coding and the financial overheads are lower than with the app store.
(this can be done using regular shell script, in my case there is, however, some weird, hard to debug issue with AppStore validation)
The missing bit is making the app paid, which normally should be trivial with the AppStore.