I agree with your point that there should be some baked in capability for a more comprehensive check on the HTTP response. There are probably some edge cases around this regarding stream=True (load header only, not content) and iter_content() which pulls chunks from a buffer so the entire content isn't loaded into memory at once. Probably surmountable.

FWIW Response.status_code is an int, so it might need to be a member function on Response.