Thank you!

Isn't this literally fishhook theory? The centre and far right being more similar to each other than either to the left?

What have you been reading, if you don't mind?

related: there's definitely been an uptick in the New Right referring to things they don't like as gay which i thought we left in the past 10 years ago

I do agree that STV can have trap options for voters as you describe. Although, I think so can party list systems, just at different stages. (E.g. Ideologically similar parties that are opposed for historical reasons. Compromises during coalitions.)

I also didn't think the size objection was particularly good, since you can have multiple, smaller magnitude districts that are still pretty proportional and aren't gerrymandered.

I just want to be clear: I'm not saying that STV is perfect. I'm saying that gerrymandering is so bad that there are multiple, obvious solutions. If someone's worried about, say, formalising parties through party list, then STV is there for them, and will even give roughly proportional results.

Multi-member districts militate against gerrymandering though. If a district is gerrymandered 60-40 (A, B) with 10 seats, then 6 of those seats should go to A and 4 to B. The lines wouldn't really matter. (The exhaustion part of ranking could though.)

Just have 6, 9-magnitude seats. It'll be roughly as proportional as a party proportional system with an electoral threshold of 10%.

You don't even need party lists. With single transferable vote, you can just have voters rank all candidates. Any candidate over quota gets a seat. Gerrymandering is oversolved lol.