Trying to set the profile status of users in my slack workspace using the slack python SDK (users_profile_set), however I am getting "invalid_user"

Question

I am trying to create an App for my workspace which would set the user's presence at appropriate moments. I wrote the following test function:

from slack_sdk import WebClient

client = WebClient(token=SLACK_USER_TOKEN)
email = 'test.email=test.com'

response = client.users_lookupByEmail(email=email)
user_id = response["user"]["id"]
client.users_setPresence(user=user_id, presence="away")
status_message = "deactivated"
status_emoji = ":x:"
client.users_profile_set(
   user=user_id,
   profile={
       "status_text": status_message,
       "status_emoji": status_emoji
   }
)

But upon executing this code, I get:

The request to the Slack API failed. (url: https://www.slack.com/api/users.profile.set) The server responded with: {'ok': False, 'error': 'invalid_user'}

I have the following scopes active for SLACK_USER_TOKEN:

users.profile:read
users.profile:write
users:read
users:read.email
users:write

Why am I getting Invalid ID? I double checked and the user_id is correct and belongs to an actual user...

I expected the status of the user changed with a message showing on their slack profile. Instead, I got the error I mentioned above.