diff --git a/docs/news.rst b/docs/news.rst
index 525ddbf40..fab8b6f20 100644
--- a/docs/news.rst
+++ b/docs/news.rst
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ Scrapy 2.11.1 (unreleased)
         To minimize the impact of this change on existing code,
         :func:`~scrapy.utils.iterators.xmliter_lxml` now supports indicating
         the node namespace with a prefix in the node name, and big files with
-        highly nested trees.
+        highly nested trees when using libxml2 2.7+.
 
     -   Fixed regular expressions in the implementation of the
         :func:`~scrapy.utils.response.open_in_browser` function.
diff --git a/scrapy/utils/iterators.py b/scrapy/utils/iterators.py
index 8610e9b77..b6abe2e0c 100644
--- a/scrapy/utils/iterators.py
+++ b/scrapy/utils/iterators.py
@@ -19,7 +19,6 @@ from typing import (
 from warnings import warn
 
 from lxml import etree
-from packaging.version import Version
 
 from scrapy.exceptions import ScrapyDeprecationWarning
 from scrapy.http import Response, TextResponse
@@ -31,12 +30,6 @@ if TYPE_CHECKING:
 
 logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
 
-_LXML_VERSION = Version(etree.__version__)
-_LXML_HUGE_TREE_VERSION = Version("4.2")
-_ITERPARSE_KWARGS = {}
-if _LXML_VERSION >= _LXML_HUGE_TREE_VERSION:
-    _ITERPARSE_KWARGS["huge_tree"] = True
-
 
 def xmliter(
     obj: Union[Response, str, bytes], nodename: str
@@ -108,7 +101,7 @@ def xmliter_lxml(
         reader,
         encoding=reader.encoding,
         events=("end", "start-ns"),
-        **_ITERPARSE_KWARGS,
+        huge_tree=True,
     )
     selxpath = "//" + (f"{prefix}:{nodename}" if namespace else nodename)
     needs_namespace_resolution = not namespace and ":" in nodename