Re:Boltons: A set of BSD-licensed, pure-Python utilities
by maxerickson on Wednesday October 10, 2018 @07:38AM
(#18183857)
The comparison would be with urllib.request:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html
Which right there recommends Requests, but for simple tasks it's kind of unfortunate that people bring in a library dependency.
While having stuff in stdlib can be convenient, it all tends to be where active development goes to die. Compare httplib with something like Requests.