Generally I use custom utilities for HTTP generation, URL extraction, chunked transfer decoding, URL encoding/decoding, GZIP/ZIP/PDF/MP4 extraction, etc. Thus I can use any TCP client I want to make HTTP requests from the command line. I do not need a browser to request content. Nor do I need projects like curl or projects that use libcurl like youtube-dl. For large downloads I use tnftp. The shell script I use to download YouTube videos is 424 bytes.

For reading HTML I prefer links. It has the best rendering of HTML tables, IMO, and is for me the easiest source code to work with. I did use lynx back in the late 90's but would never go back to it. Its bloated. Its slow. Im not sure why anyone interested in text-only browsers would use it other than they are unaware of or have not tried alternatives.