Out of curiosity, what’s the reason why you need to stay on transformers <3.5.0? Breaking changes should be minimal, and documented. (cc @sgugger @thomwolf)
Yet another workaround, would be to patch your code slightly to use our newly spun off library huggingface_hub: GitHub - huggingface/huggingface_hub: Client library to download and publish models and other files on the huggingface.co hub