[necovek]

Parts of requests has been adopted into stdlib: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html

People mostly defer to requests because they do not track language development closely and because we are creatures of habit.

I try to avoid non-stdlib packages when stdlib will do a good job, but I received negative feedback from people who aren't aware of the updates and couldn't foresee supply-chain attacks.

[zahlman]

The current standard library urllib is a refactoring of previous attempts from the 2.x standard library, and urllib.request is just a sub-package. It does not represent adoption of requests; requests builds on urllib3, which was created to fill in gaps in what the standard library provided, and named like that because the 2.x standard library had both a `urllib` and a `urllib2` as they struggled to figure it out.

[necovek]

For a long time, urllib had everything deprecated except for the parsing code which remained relevant as the upstream RFCs have not changed IIRC.

Urllib2 is now also gone and mostly replaced with urllib.request.

It should cover 99% of the use-cases one would use requests for — I am not sure how and why it matters that it is a subpackage and not a top-level package?

This is just a natural evolution of a widely used language where you have to be careful with backwards compatibility.