STV only makes sense for multi-winner elections. It fundamentally does not pick the best candidate - just the first who can scrape together sufficient support. A person can be literally everyone's second choice and still lose.

Approval is a straight improvement over FPTP - there is no good reason, at all, to prefer FPTP. It completely eliminates the way similar candidates cannibalize each other's votes. It minimizes self-defeating efforts to be "strategic" by ranking no-chance buttheads higher, or only giving your preferred frontrunner half a vote.

If you're gonna do ranked ballots to pick one candidate then use a Condorcet method.

And this type of disagreement on what sort of system to move to is among the reasons the lukewarm effort Trudeau attempted fizzled out pretty much immediately.

Nope.

What you're looking for is called Score Voting. Approval is just yes-or-meh. It is the simplest form of Score, and yet, it avoids a lot of self-defeating behaviors, has less reported regret than other systems, and somehow matches Condorcet results pretty reliably.