Hi, I just installed 1.8 (2686) on High-Sierra Mac OS 10.13.6 and ran into this issue.
I Tried launching an executable directly by navigating to the following dir and right-clicking open.
/Applications/KSP_os/KSP/Contents/MacOS/KSP
This launched the game but still got stuck on "Loading Asset Bundle Definitions".
Can you please post direct instructions for the workarounds to launch this? I'm installing this for my 8-YO son and don't have time to dig through forums and posts to try potential alternatives.