Ghosting doesn’t avoid the conversation. It just makes the other person have it alone.

Disappearing does not cancel a conversation, it hands the whole thing to the other person to hold alone. They still have it, in their head, for weeks, and with your half missing they fill the gap with whatever they already believed about themselves. Most people ghost because the alternative is a hard ten minutes, which is understandable. Those ten minutes are still smaller than what the silence costs somebody else.

If you want out of something, send the short honest version without over-explaining. Two sentences is plenty and you do not have to argue for it. And if you were the one ghosted, the silence was about them.