GDK has a lock to mark critical sections inside the backends.
Additionally, code that would re-enter into the GTK main loop was
supposed to hold the lock.

Back in the Good Old Days™ this was guaranteed to kind of work only on
the X11 backend, and would cause a neat explosion on any other GDK
backend.

During GTK+ 3.x we deprecated the API to enter and leave the critical
sections, and now we can remove all the internal uses of the lock, since
external API that uses GTK+ 4.x won't be able to hold the GDK lock.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793124