I observed that requests to Google Cloud APIs take much longer when using UserAccessTokenCredentials (documented here) as credentials for client libraries, e.g., Storage library for Python.

Diving into the code, I realized that UserAccessTokenCredentials triggers token refresh (resulting in an additional API request) on each request due to how the before_request method is implemented:

def before_request(self, request, method, url, headers):
    self.refresh(request)
    self.apply(headers)

In comparison, the before_request method in the base class has a mechanism to trigger token refresh only when necessary:

if not self.valid:
    self.refresh(request)

Would it be reasonable to check token validity before request in the UserAccessTokenCredentials strategy?