urllib3 1.x and 2.x behave differently when reading a gzipped response from a cassette. If the cassette is made with urllib3 1.x, then the gzipped body is saved as base64. 1.x is able to read this fine and the request returns the decompressed data. However, if this cassette is then used on 2.x then the response's data is compressed.
Here is a minimal repo with a test illustrating the difference.