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.