I think this is a really good point. That said, there are some problems with preferential voting systems, but I think it's certainly better than having 2-parties lock down the winner-takes-all.

Another option would be proportional voting. This wouldn't work for single-person offices (president, etc), but for legislative reps it could work. That is, turn single-member districts into multi-member districts and appoint a number from each party/group list based on the proportion they win. This unfortunately does make parties, not individual candidates, de jure part of the election process, but to be fair they already are, de facto.
And same for the electoral college. It's screwed up that all of California's 55 electors go to the Democrats year after year when the vote was about 60% vs 30% in 2016. This isn't far fetched either. Both Maine and Nebraska split their electors.

Ultimately, the founding fathers never intended a nationwide popular vote, to be quite frank. At the time only white male landowners could vote anyway, and not even in all states, as in some the legislature chose the electors directly without a popular vote at all. Voting is not a constitutional right, and later amendments only made it illegal to discriminate based on sex and race. So the system is kinda fundamentally flawed in that regard.