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.

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.