In particular: how are they (and you) defining "truth" here? Are they claiming that people are using the ranking system incorrectly? Or that they're using it correctly-but-strategically, ending up with unintended consequences?

Arrow's Theorem says that there isn't any ground truth in a multiway election. That is, you can always define some not-unreasonable set of criteria to lead to any outcome you want.

I'm skeptical of ranked-choice voting (or any other voting scheme) to resolve the problem that people feel unheard -- at least in the general case. It sounds like you think the outcome in this case does reflect the sense of the people, and I'm interested in that.