Recipient not willing to take Humble Gift Link

Well, Humble can ban you if you're giving too much gifts in some time. However for person who redeems it, then there are no penalties of course.

Humble Bundle does allow gifting to your friends, but they consider SteamGifts a trading site and will ban people who use gift links here. I'm not sure I've seen anyone claim to have been banned for receiving too many gift links, usually for giving them out, but it sounds like this person already has a warning on their account and doesn't want to risk it.

When i give away HB games, I click the gift link to view the region restrictions, then close that window and grab the key since Humble can't tell who activated a key, like they can with a gift link.

how do you see the region restriction there?

Just send the key.

There are rumors that there can be problems with humble gift links when giving or receiving from randos on the internet.

did end up sending the key.. still feels weird...

I would ask for re-roll. If winner crying instead of happy accepting :)

I'm with the recipient here, it's a topic that's been discussed previously:

https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/D0WX8/just-a-heads-up-about-giftlinks-from-humble-bundle
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/5cxaE/psa-if-you-are-giftingtrading-humble-bundle-games-dont-use-giftlinks-anymore

Long story short, Humble Bundle doesn't like people trading games AND they don't like people giving games away. They have, at times, fully banned users from their platform for doing so... And every single time, they've realized that this was happening because they are able to track where their giftlinks are going. But they're not able to track where their keys are going.

Therefore, keys are safer for everybody!

As a European citizen, you should be fine sending gift links, as Humble's TOS (and enforcement of them by banning people from their accounts and unredeemed keys) is pretty much against every consumer law there is in the EU.
EU citizens have gotten their accounts back after sending Humble emails saying they were in the EU and warning Humble against breaking the law but I tend to send keys instead of gift links myself when I make GAs to avoid having to tangle with Humble support.

There is nothing wrong with you opening the steam key on Humble and giving the recipient the key directly instead of the gift link, but there are boons - possibly both for you and for the recipient.

While Humble Bundle do allow for you to send gifts (as gift links) to your steam friends they have some restrictions;
It has to be to your actual friends, not random people you've friended temporarily,
Not too many gifts to be sent (though where they draw the line I do not know, likely at some percentage level),
You can absolutely not use places like SteamGifts because Humble sees it as breaking their TOS, specifically third party re-selling rules in there (as they see the points we receive here and the levelling up to access more GA's as third party payment received for "their" games).
Probably more rules too that I have no clue about.

How do they check all that you ask? Well, I don't think they do really.
However, there are ways to get caught out.

For example - You buy a lot of bundles on HB, and you reach some threshold of a percentage on how many times you click on "Gift To Friend" vs how many times you click on "Redeem On Steam".
You give away a gift link and there is a problem with it, so either you or recipient contacts HB about it and mentions Steamgifts or similar site - that immediately alerts support a gift link is possibly used in third party reselling, and they can check both buyer and receiver of they have been friends for some time or not.
HB have in the past (actively and sometimes rather aggressively) banned people from HB for both gifting and receiving gift links in a manner HB finds suspicious - so if this guy is already warned by them once I understand his reluctance to receive the gift link.

And so should you. If his account gets flagged once again your account might get checked too, as the gift link CLEARLY identifies source - meaning you - and you do not want to be dragged down in someone elses mess.

Just click to show the Steam key on HB store, then even click to redeem your your own account - that now registers on HB site as you redeemeing for your own account.
On the Steam page that has opened while doing above you simply do not redeem, just copy key instead and use on steamgifts - or as in this case, give to the winner.

Hypoheticallly HB could possibly even trace the Steam key if they really wanted to, but I think most (if not almost all) of their alert systems are automated, and as such I doubt they get inside Valve information on individual keys. In a high profile case manual support might reach out to Valve and get some info, but for a key here and there I doubt very much they would do it. Gift links however, can easily be setup for automated check-ups as they contain information on buyer/sender, and receiver - couple that with public profiles on Steam and "whammo": Possibly banned accounts.

Short version: I think the recipient cares about you..