Hi Marc, a similar problem has been reported before, see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=861594 and https://trac.cppcheck.net/ticket/8042 .
It is intentional that cppcheck-gui terminates if the --data-dir option is supplied (the setting is persistent). The documentation has been fixed in 1.79-1. As a workaround, if you once started cppcheck-gui with the --data-dir=/usr/share/cppcheck/cfg option, it should no longer complain about a missing std.cfg file. However, I missed back then that the default is still wrong. I fixed that now in 1.86-1. Best regards, Joachim