Strong agree. Pip doesn't really need Requests' functionality as far as I can tell, but the vendored transitive dependencies represent a considerable fraction (something like a quarter IIRC) of Pip's bulk. And a big fraction of that bulk (and it's much the same for Rich) at startup, even if ultimately it turns out that no web requests need to be made. Which in turn is the main reason why Pip on my machine takes longer than the https://lawsofux.com/doherty-threshold/ to process `pip install` with no actual package specified. (A process that involves importing more than five hundred Python modules, of which almost a hundred are Requests and its dependencies.)

(Of the non-Requests imports, about two thirds of them occur before Pip even considers what's on the command line — which means that they will be repeated when you use the `--python` option. Of course, Requests isn't to blame for that, but it drives home the point about keeping dependencies under control.)