[diminoten]

> but just felt adding additional dependencies was unnecessary

This notion, especially in Python and HTTP client programming, is wrong and will cost you many many more hours than it will save you.

Requests is an entire order of magnitude easier to use than urllib3, and while we may be dealing in minutes for this specific scenario, you will make up for any time investment you pay to learn Requests the very next time you need to do HTTP related work in the language.

It's a matter of not overreacting to a cost, and you're paying way more than you should to get a much smaller gain than you could, if you paid that cost elsewhere (by learning/using Requests and how to manage dependencies in Python, which you have to do anyway with bs4).