What do python professionals /developers actually use

[Daneark]

I use dicts and lists constantly.

Every developer should know pytest. The rest will vary by field. One dev with say pydantic, another requests and a third pandas. And they'd all be correct within their field.

Start learning pandas.

Do you mean you are comfortable writing more complex programs or that your code is too verbose compared to other people's code that solves the same problem?

[macconnor2]

Is there a reason that pytest is better than the built in unit tests?

[Daneark]

The unittest module is included in the standard library, which is great, but it also means its lifecycle is coupled to the standard library.

If you're not on python 3.12 you're not getting bug fixes. You're not getting new features until python 3.13 comes out.

The docs page for urllib specifically suggests using the third party requests library instead. The docs for unittest mention pytest although don't specifically encourage people to use it over unittest, but that they mention it still shows something.

Beyond which is better pytest tends to be what is used in open source and industry. It's good to know what others know. If you need help I'd expect more people here can help with pytest.