Electrum doesn't have to be installed. You're only installing the utility required to upgrade the package and also upgrade the package itself. But as I said, it'll be fine without upgrading as well.
By "utility", did you mean "pip"?
According to
https://electrum.org/#download, the only dependencies that one needs to install are:
sudo apt-get install python3-pyqt5 libsecp256k1-0 python3-cryptography
I only need to install the following if I wish to install Electrum (
https://electrum.org/#download):
python3-setuptools python3-pip
Yes. Requests is not a mandatory module to be installed. It's only required to get locale and an older version should work fine as well.