These are not the same.
Honestly IRV is worse than plurality so there are plenty of reasons to oppose it other than a two-party domination conspiracy theory. Using IRV gives up monotonicity, possibilities for a distributed count, and some elements of a secret ballot (for even a medium-sized candidate list) for basically nothing.
Monotonicity is not a theoretical concern. Alaska almost immediately ran into a degenerate case [2].
[0] https://rangevoting.org/NoIrv.html
[1] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Alaska%27s_at-large_congr...
Range voting may well be much better, and there are certainly more mathematically sound versions of ranked-choice than IRV, but I think they utterly fail to convince that IRV is just as bad as plurality. They also seem to only take their game theory as far as necessary to reflect Range Voting in the best possible light. For instance, they argue that voters will almost always rank their less preferred of the front-runners last even if they have greater opposition to other candidates, but they don't explore that candidates can and do chase higher rankings among voters that won't rank them #1. It's an obvious and common strategy (candidates were already doing it in my counties first ever RCV election) so I can only assume the reason its not mentioned is that it improves the soundness of RCV in practice.
Their link is referring to the Irish presidential election, which does use IRV—but it’s a meaningless figurehead position, so it’s unclear how relevant the comparison is.
Also to note, there's nothing technically stopping the US House from moving to proportional representation along with ranked-choice and dems have proposed it recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_(Unite...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote#Unite...
And probably without even trying. Once it becomes better known, gaming the system like this will happen more often.
It's a shame that's not what everyone uses :/
though: this does go the right way. Condorcet methods are worth discussion. IRV, not so much.
IRV gets implemented a ton in the US, surprisingly. It tends to get enacted because people understand it really quickly, and it tends to get repealed because of center squeeze.