A local macOS app came back as soon as I quit it. The binary was not the cause. Two leftover jobs from earlier repair sessions were still registered with launchd: com.victor.conduit.focus-restart.20260817 and com.victor.conduit.clipboard-install. Both had been created with launchctl submit. Apple's man page says that mechanism also tells launchd to keep the program alive in the event of failure.
launchctl print gui/$(id -u)/<label>The first leftover script slept eight seconds, quit the app, then opened it again. Because launchd treated the job as KeepAlive, that sequence kept repeating. A quit that lasted about half a second was the red proof. Their recorded run counts were 8,429 and 9,169. After both labels were unloaded, the same quit left the app absent for twenty seconds of half-second samples. The app source was not changed.
The check
Before you rewrite an app that will not stay quit, print the launchd labels that mention it. Unload the leftover KeepAlive job, watch the quit again, and remove the one-shot submit helper in the same pass.