Python’s urllib2 (now urllib.request) started out in the year 2000 [0].
.NET’s WebRequest was available in .NET Framework 1.1 in 2003 [1].
But since then, Microsoft noticed the issues with WebRequest and came up with HttpClient in 2012. It has some issues and footguns, like those related to HttpClient lifetime, but it’s a solid library. On the other hand, the requests library for Python started in 2011 [2], but the stdlib library hasn’t seen many improvements.
[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6d7e47b8ea1b8cf82927d...
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.net.webr...
[2] https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/HISTORY.md#001-201...