> Second, why do we want a community-contributed module to be widely used? That's stated as a goal but without explanation. If there is a widely used community-contributed module that is better, put it in the standard library.
I think the reasoning is that offering a flawed version in the standard library can prevent an alternative from being written and gaining adoption.
I think that's it. If you haven't heard of Requests, you might re-implement it yourself from the standard library. That's totally possible (and I had to do that back in the dark days before Requests and pip), but not something most people should be doing.
The tl;dr is that if you move a package into the standard library then you are restricted by the python feature release schedule (was every 18 months, now annual) and backwards compatibility requirements (see https://peps.python.org/pep-0387/).
I think the reasoning is that offering a flawed version in the standard library can prevent an alternative from being written and gaining adoption.