This is the key question:

I feel that the far better solution would just be to not have the interpreter throw an error when nothing has gone wrong. Does anyone know a way I could do this? A way to completely suppress the interpreter from considering this error? Or is there a better way than the two I've suggested?

A way to achieve this with aiohttp and aiofiles would be to use the timeout parameter of aiohttp.ClientSession.get function.

See documentation of the constructor with all parameters:

timeout – a ClientTimeout settings structure, 300 seconds (5min) total timeout, 30 seconds socket connect timeout by default.

Added in version 3.3.

Changed in version 3.10.9: The default value for the sock_connect timeout has been changed to 30 seconds.