The software is a joke - it's worse than bloatware. I've dumped my time debugging it over the past couple days and have decided to vent here before uninstalling for good.
Picked up Battlefield 1 from the Steam Summer Sales and was able to launch it once out of 50 some attempts (with repairing, reinstalling, sfc scans, cache clearing, reboots, etc.). I am also unable to recreate that one successful launch no matter what I do (and I'm testing the EA Launcher in isolation - not trying to launch the game or through steam).
As far as I can tell the launcher has been riddled with issues for years and people have chanced upon pseudo-solutions. Not worth wasting time over.