Hi @Siegfried Heintze , welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.
Use of HttpClient in OnConfiguring method is for managing multiple connections and to optimize using them. I would request you to once go through the below article which talks about the same in details:
HttpClientFactory in the Azure Cosmos DB .NET SDK
We can always choose to write the code our way, this is just a way to handle lot of connections. Please let us know if you need more details.