I think this is mostly a layering issue. If everyone that just wants to scrape HTML or talk to an API is using the basic HTTP API, then you've got this problem. That's where Python was about ten years ago - using the stdlib's urllib, it was very easy to talk HTTP, but you'd probably do it badly.

Then requests came along, aimed to make it easy for anyone to consume HTTP, with sensible defaults -- and it rapidly became the defacto standard way to get things done. Hopefully the rust ecosystem will have similar libraries, built on top of this new 'http' base.