That is a bit of a weird criticism of STAR voting. Scoring Then Automatic Runoff. The runoff is fundamentally a key stage of STAR voting.

I also do not think runoff fixes most voting systems. It isn’t compatible with FPTP, approval voting with runoff would cause alot of vote erasure (if you approve of both finalists, your vote is ignored even if you approve one more than the other), and you’d fundamentally have to change how ranked choice works to accept runoff, to the point that you’ve essentially recreated STAR voting again (but with more or fewer boxes depending on how many candidates there are).