Every voting system has some flaws (see: Arrow's impossibility theorem), and Instant Runoff Voting definitely saw its worst-case scenario rear its ugly head in Alaska: A Condorcet winner existed (Nick Begich), he lost,
and voters whose first choice was Plain and second choice was Begich could theoretically, retrospectivally, all changed their first votes from Palin to Begich to have him win rather than Mary Peltola.
It's important that I say retrospectively. This was a house race with national coverage, tons of high-quality polling from pollsters with nothing better to do, and it was still absolutely not clear from that polling that Begich would do better than Palin in round 2, or that Palin was likely to beat Begich in round 1. If I had the opinions of those hypothetically strategic voters, and I were completely strategic, and completely tuned into that polling, I still would have voted honestly. The strategy was only apparent after the fact.
Thinking about "defense in depth" against this scenario, we'd be remiss not to mention Condorcet ranked choice voting methods, which always elect a Condorcet winner, and only resort to (game-able) elimination procedures if there isn't one. Not only would that have resulted in a better outcome in Alaska, it would have made the possibility of strategic voting much, much more remote, both because a strategic scenario would be much less likely, and because that strategic scenario would be much less visible before the election.
With score voting, strategies are always available and almost always obvious: just exaggerate your score differences between the most likely candidates. The fact that strategic dishonesty would have helped in Alaska is a fair criticism of IRV, but the real commonness of strategic scenarios in STAR and score are a more primary feature.