Whether it's better than the average is irrelevant, that isn't the benchmark. It needs to be better than or equal to all of the third party libraries for it to be worthwhile, otherwise, why does it exist? When you pick a library you don't pick all of them, you pick just the best one that meets the criteria you need, and the standard library can't beat the flexibility that other people will have to better meet those criteria without needing to partake in the process upstream.
(It's also not true that the standard library is generally pretty good IMHO, but that will start to veer us into subjectives [which I think the comment above my original post has already done anyhow]).
> When you pick a library you don't pick all of them, you pick just the best one that meets the criteria you need, and the standard library can't beat the flexibility that other people will have to better meet those criteria without needing to partake in the process upstream.
So, you're using three libraries that all depend on something like urllib - and they each use the library that fits their usecase best. Now you need to debug/review/depend on updates for 6 (7 if you also use the stdlib for something) foreign codebases rather than 3 + the standard library.
It's a trade-off between old/new good/best simple/complex (or complicated/complected). A standard lib that needs to maintain stability for 10+ years can never be "best" for all that time. But by being "good enough" it can often still be the best choice overall when the life cycle of a project is considered.
(It's also not true that the standard library is generally pretty good IMHO, but that will start to veer us into subjectives [which I think the comment above my original post has already done anyhow]).