FYI I updated my original post to clarify a couple of points, sorry for the confusion.

Primaries promote extremism because they segregate the first rounds of voting to specific parties. Each primary will remove candidates that might otherwise have majority support, in favor of candidates who have the most support from that particular party only. This is bad enough in the US's two-party system, but would be even worse if there were more parties.

Polling informs voters which candidates they should vote for, and which candidates would be pointless to vote for. In first-past-the-post, it's a waste to vote for anyone other than the two most popular candidates. Voters may drop support for their preferred candidate based on polling incorrectly saying that person had no chance.

Candidates who drop out to prevent vote-splitting only do so because the current voting system doesn't allow voters to specify that they like two people equally. There's no reason why having two good choices should skew results toward one bad choice.

Limiting voter choice limits democracy. Each candidate is slightly different, and the determination should be made by voters. But our current system often requires candidates to drop out before voters can make that determination.

Consider presidential primaries. Candidates attend primaries one region at a time. Along the way, polling and results from completed primaries inform which candidates should stay in the race. Candidates drop out to put support behind others based on these early results that only represent certain states. If candidates didn't drop out, they risk dragging down all similar candidates. This situation isn't ideal, and is solved by ranked choice voting.

I'm not familiar with Alaska's version of ranked choice voting. But I am familiar with Maine's. In Maine, the ballot allows voters to select candidates in order based on preference. If the first choice candidate wouldn't have received majority support, the second choice vote is used, and so on.

Maine's implementation is the same system used in run-off elections, but done all at once on a single ballot. A run-off election happens when the winning candidate is required to have >50% of the votes. The worst performing candidates are dropped, and a new election takes place. This continues until the winner of an election has >50% of the vote.

Pre-RCV, Maine had several elections where the winner had ~35% of the vote, while the other two candidates were equally liked and their voters would have supported either. The solution was to require a candidate to get >50% of the votes to win, and the possible implementations were run-off elections or RCV.

RCV enables voters to specify that they like more than one candidate, while also specifying which they prefer overall. They get to say, ahead of time, "if my favorite loses, vote for my second favorite". There's still only one vote from each person in the result.

Personally, I don't find RCV to be complicated. It's simply an instant runoff, without the costs of holding multiple elections. But maybe that comes from me living in a place where run-off elections were common. I think you may agree at least that it's good to require the winning candidate to have majority support, and failing that, would you agree that it's better if they have majority support than majority disapproval?