I've recently updated an internal tool which basically acts as a configuration and dependency/context manager for performing hundreds of api calls. I added an httpx backend (to test vs the current urllib3 backend) and also introduced an async API (httpx as well). However, from your benchmarks it seems like I should've went with aiohttp for faster async? I will work on integrating pyreqwest as well

Yes httpx is badly broken. Eg its connection pooling implementation is not great at all. There are various issues in httpx/httpcore. There are also old open PRs trying to fix issues but maintainer(s) are just not intrested.