Allow using other async libraries

The only thing holding us from doing this is one asyncio gather call and HTTP library.
We could switch to httpx:
https://www.python-httpx.org/async/#supported-async-environments

Start by locating the asyncio gather call and the HTTP library usage described in the issue. Read the linked httpx documentation on supported async environments, then determine the affected calls and verify that the library still works with an alternative async setup without breaking existing behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.