It sure does seem absurd, and so thankfully there's no case where RCV does that! :)

There seems to be a lot of misinformation thrown around about this, where people seem to be conflating different issues.

I'm not sure what your source is, but you might be misunderstanding the Favorite Betrayal Criterion... which seems counterintuitive at first but isn't really. There's a lot of noise made about the fact that moving a non-preferred candidate higher than your preferred candidate can help your preferred candidate to win... but it's actually because you're ranking your preferred candidate's main opponent even lower in the process. And also it's basically impossible to do strategically because you'd need to know how everybody else voted first.

End of story, there's nothing absurd about cadidate A winning, but if some people downranked that candidate from 2nd to 3rd rank, then that candidate would lose.