I don't think Conor would ever duck anybody, but it's not crazy to think the UFC has steered him away from unfavorable match-ups as much as possible. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's explicitly what the UFC matchmakers do - they try to make exciting fights and build stars. Risking a rising star striker getting crushed - or worse, smothered - would be stupid.

Let's be honest, it isn't a completely ridiculous point. Conor's a dynamic striker with a relatively unknown ground game who's been in the UFC for three and a half years, during which time he's fought eight opponents, two of them for titles. Exactly one of those opponents was a clear bad match-up: a grappling-focused fighter who was actually expected to use his offensive wrestling - and that guy was a short-notice replacement. He also gave Conor more trouble than anybody else in exactly the way the naysayers predicted, and the other elite grappler Conor fought is the only one who actually beat him. So it's not unfair to say he's mostly avoided grapplers (intentionally or not), or to suggest they're a bigger threat to him - the RDA fight was made at moment when the incentives were huge and Conor's demands were impossible to deny.

Also this point isn't a recent one; I heard more about it before the Siver fight than I do now. And if we were talking about anybody else, I don't think it would be a controversial point at all, it'd just be bog-standard bitching about the UFC. But everything about Conor is way more polarizing than it needs to be.