FWIW, other players coming from KGS have reported the same sort of thing, though not to that extreme.
It is important to be aware that there is very little that calibrates go servers to each other. It strikes me as somewhat miraculous that our ranks on different servers end up as similar as they do in practice: there is no almost mathematical or practical reason that I’m aware of that this should be the case.
Very occasionally, a server does something to adjust it’s ranks if it is perceived as “out of wack” but I can only vaguely recall something like that happening once in the short couple of years I’ve been involved.
I don’t really buy the idea that handicap play is affecting things: the rating system takes handicap into account, so without a hypothesis of how it would be causing this effect, it’s a bit of a shot in the dark as to the cause.
Especially since other players reporting the same effect haven’t been similarly playing handicap here, that I am aware.
I guess it would be interesting to see if the OP suddenly ranks up if they start playing unhandicapped!
My feeling is that the OP’s “real” OGS rank is currently more like 19-20k, which is where it was for some time before a few recent losses. The OP is not currently playing “the biggest move” during the opening, which is one of the signs of someone transitioning from TPK into DDK, so it seems to me the rank is “correct” relative to other OGS players (irrespective of handicapped play).
A timely meme is always good: