Python finally offloads some batteries

> but dropping useful modules that people depend upon is not.

If nobody is willing to maintain the code, it is de facto unmaintained. You can slap a "maintained" label on it all you like, but that does not cause maintenance work to get done.

> but they'd get help dealing with underlying core changes that affect their module.

I believe we've all learned the hard way that core changes should be backwards-compatible, and so this kind of help should not be required in the vast majority of reasonable cases.

> But after the pain, the benefit is a quality url module in the standard library and urllib could be re-implemented as a thin wrapper over it, and/or dropped after a very long deprecation period.

They certainly can't do that until requests stops depending on urllib.