[gorgoiler]

It has two! — http.client and urllib.request — and they are really usable.

Lots of people just like requests though as an alternative, or for historical reasons, or because of some particular aspect of its ergonomics, or to have a feature they’d rather have implemented for them than have to write in their own calling code.

At this stage it’s like using jQuery just to find an element by css selector (instead of just using document.querySelector.)

[WesolyKubeczek]

Requests used to have good PR back in the day and ended up entrenched as a transitive dependency for a lot of things. Because it’s for humans, right?

But recently I had to do something using raw urllib3, and you know what? It’s just as ergonomic.

[masklinn]

That’s pretty much irrelevant given urllib3 is a third party dependency as well.

[ratorx]

Sure historical popularity is a good reason for people who are already familiar with it to keep using it.

That is not really an excuse for why the standard library docs for the clients you mentioned link to requests though (especially if they were actually good, rather than just being legacy). If they really were good, why would the standard library itself suggest something else?