That's actually the inverse of what ranked choice does.

Ranked choice fulfills "later-no-harm"; filling out a third choice can never hurt your second or first choice.

Because of that, it fails "favorite betrayal"; there are times when you get a worse outcome by voting for your honest favorite.

That's mostly because ranked choice doesn't consider your second or third picks until your first and second have been eliminated. So there's a bunch of weird edgecases where a compromise candidate with enough second, third etc. votes to win in the final round gets eliminated early on before they actually get any second, third etc. place support.

Suppose there's an election like that where the Liberal is the compromise candidate that could beat either the NDP or Conservative candidate in the final round, but because the NDP and Conservative get more first-place votes, the election goes Conservative. Depending on the particulars, NDP voters could potentially have elected the Liberal by staying home, or even by voting Conservative. Either way, they'd have been better off strategically voting for the Liberal than voting honestly for the NDP.

In general, voting honestly in ranked choice is only safe either if you're voting for a fringe third party that could never win or if you're voting for one of the two candidates with the most total popularity.