is a non-blocking HttpWebRequest possible?

[Kurt-Dekker]

The easiest way to do this will always be to “when in Rome do as the Romans do” and use UnityWebRequest.

AFAIK it can do everything you might need network-wise.

Networking, UnityWebRequest, WWW, Postman, curl, WebAPI, etc:

Using Unity for subscription lists

As with all network code, get it working with Postman or curl first. That makes it NOT a Unity problem. Solve the networking first. You must solve that or anything else is irrelevant. Once you have that working, then try and port it to UnityWebRequest. If it still doesn't work, one handy debug solution is to hook up a proxy like Charles and compare the functioning output from Postman / curl to the output from Unity, and from that reason about where your issues are.

Unity web request acting stupid.

Always get network stuff working outside of Unity in either curl or PostMan, then connect a proxy such as Charles and start trying to replicate the traffic shape with UnityWebRequest. Any other way risks wasting a lot of your time for trivial issues that only the above way will instantly reveal.

And setting up a proxy can be very helpful too, in order to compare traffic:

Using Charles Proxy with Unity