Knew there was a 99% chance this would happen. California's been using a similar trick (jungle primaries) to ensure Feinstein and Harris didn't even have to face a Republican in their last couple Senatorial elections there, plus they've got ranked-choice voting in their most pozzed cities (San Fran, Berkeley).
Maine's been using ranked-choice to ensure Democrats prevail more often and that when they can't, the state will never go further right than Susan Collins, as well. Mash them together on a statewide level and what do you get? A thousand-year Murkowski dynasty and Democrats winning until either Alaskan voters wise up & return to one-man-one-vote, or the stars burn out. Note that
Palin would have won on the first ballot, before all the anti-Palin voters were given additional chances to consolidate their votes behind anyone but her in the next rounds of vote-counting. Tshibaka too had a much stronger chance at sinking Murkowski in a normal Republican primary, as opposed to the open one which has allowed Murkowski to go into November with a fairly commanding lead and a very good chance at winning without even needing to run a write-in campaign this time.
As a Canadian I can tell you with 100% certainty, our Tories use ranked-choice primary voting to ensure the establishment always gets their 'consensus' candidate in the end.
It's how we missed out on Mad Max Bernier in 2017 while a(n almost literal) milksop, Andrew Scheer, got the leadership position instead and promptly blew the next election. Additional fuckery granting 'points' to candidates based on how many voters live in each province was used to
screw all the remotely anti-establishment candidates out of the 2020 race, even though one of them (social conservative Leslyn Lewis) was actually straight up leading on the second ballot.
Forget all the propaganda 'nonpartisan electoral reform organizations' like FairVote (who want to institute a national popular vote system, ie.
abolish the Electoral College) pushes. The actual results of any bullshit that further complicates voting beyond the simple one-man-one-vote + closed primary baseline is now so obvious as to be undeniable: Democrats and RINOs will become your only options and 'extremists' (that is, anyone who isn't willing to become a puppet of either arm of the establishment) will be eternally sidelined.