My experience is that when creating challenges with handicap on OGS, two out of three people who accept the challenge will cancel it after the first move. This doesn’t happen when creating challenges without handicap. So there appears to be a clear tendency of players to dislike handicaps on OGS.
This wasn’t the case on other servers. I used to play on KGS and over there most games were played with handicaps. I think on KGS, players were afraid to play without handicap, because in terms of ranks, losing against a player with a lower rank without handicap costs a lot, and winning against a player with a lower rank without handicap brings no reward. Whereas playing with handicap brings the same risk and reward as playing against someone of equal rank, since the handicap compensates perfectly for the rank difference.
So this distaste for handicaps is definitely an OGS phenomenon.