I've never heard of STAR, but I'm not immediately convinced it's the best option. It would be interesting to see actual data comparing it to other voting methods (e.g. [1], not the table on the STAR website).
I'm partial to ranked choice voting for most local elections and House elections, because you can do some interesting things with proportional representation.
The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice.
If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI
Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay, but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is actually promoting it in real use.
The best research out there indicates STAR as the best, and it works best by that simulation you describe as well.
Here's some references:
The exact same approach as your first link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4FXLQoLDBA
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSE/
https://paretoman.github.io/ballot/newer.html
The only Ranked Choice approach anyone is promoting is Instant Runoff which discards preference votes relatively arbitrarily. Your second choice vote never counts if they happen to get eliminated in an earlier round than your first choice.
If you have trouble following how IRV unfairly counts votes and even leads to bad outcomes, this simple demonstration may help make it clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q10TsLw_3YI
Now, there are some options like Ranked Pairs that are at least arguably okay, but that's far more complex to understand and to tabulate and nobody is actually promoting it in real use.