Earlier quoted context omitted.
idk but Jython didn't. So I don't think there's anything inherent in the language outside of CPython that calls for it.
The complete semantics of Python object lifetime are expensive to implement in a compatible manner without a GIL. Jython got around this by not doing it, making it not fully compatible (yes, people do depend on objects being eagerly freed), just using the JVM GC instead. If you do want full compatibility, the choice is between single-threaded performance and parallelism.
I get that this must be one aspect of the necessity of the GIL but I mean, C++ also has eager free behavior due to RAII and threads are working fine there, as long as you know what you're doing. Perhaps that's the rub though, it's pretty easy to crash/deadlock in C++ and we blame the programmer rather than the language.