This is true, Stockfish expects its opponent to play as well as itself (outside of the 'contempt' setting, not sure if that was used or tuned per game). So it won't play edgy lines that invite blunders if they are even a centipawn worse than what it thinks is the 'correct' line.

Funnily enough, I feel there's a lesson for startup people in this. I have seen many people (myself included) talk themselves out of big, bold bets just because they are very good at thinking up reasons something should never work.

Scoring conditions for chess tournaments cause forcing a draw to be more favorable than a loss, likely causing the programmers to heavily weigh draws over losses. Contrast this with Go engines where there are no draws, the incentives for finishing chess games in a draw that would otherwise end in a loss is much higher.

It might have something to do with the "contempt" setting used by the developers for this tornaument

I'm not an expert, but it may be the equivalent of a strong human defensive player, e.g. Petrosian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigran_Petrosian).