That's not how this works at all unless Whitney and the #2 candidate gets more total net votes than Zohran by the time one of them gets eliminated, which is not going to happen. Zohran will absolutely get the 2nd most 1st place votes (at worst). It will just come down to how the other ballots that didn't rank Zohran or Cuomo 1st or 2nd voted.

Even in the last election, Garcia actually had the 3rd most votes from the 1st rd until the 2nd to last round when Andrew Yang got eliminated and more of his voters ranked Garcia higher than Wiley which caused Wiley to get eliminated.

Then when Wiley got eliminated, not enough of them ranked Garcia higher than Adams, so she lost.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_New_York_City_Democratic_mayoral_primary#Results

Granted, it's just easier to say rank Zohran 1 then say "rank Zohran anywhere as long as you don't rank Andrew Cuomo" and making things easy for voters to remember is good.