I know this is an old post, but some additional info:
This not only seizes up the window manager, but actually seems to have the effect of eventually seizing up the whole kernel - power-off / power-on.
I encountered this problem a few weeks ago - it is indeed easily reproducible.
System is Fedora 39, running KDE / X.
Once the debugger breaks, KDE is seized hard, as described in earlier posts. My plan was to use Ctrl+Alt+F3 to get a console login prompt from where I was planning to attempt to killall -9 gdb. I was actually able to login if I did it quickly. The echo of keystrokes was very laggy, and by the time I got a few keystrokes entered to kill the debugger, the entire kernel seems seized. Monitors go to sleep and can't ping from another computer. This seems particularly surprising as all the processes involved are running in user space, and the text terminal does not have any window manager involved.
Hopefully this might provide a clue to anyone working on a solution.
Unfortunately, this lock-up is so destructive that I gave up trying to debug Qt::Popup widgets, and am just removing that flag while debugging - or of course good old printf / qDebug.