Here is a hypothetical application which may have similar problem.
(1) It is a multi threaded application using gpgme, forking another process (possibly, exec).
(2) One of threads invokes gpgme_new, gpgme_op_import and gpg_op_verify.
(3) When the control goes to gpgme_op_* then gpgme_io_spawn by a thread A, another thread B forks a process.
(3-1) While the thread A is polling pipe I/O, forked process holds pipe file descriptors too.
(3-2) Until the forked process exists, pipe I/O polling by the thread A continues (because pipe's other end is still active).

There is FD_CLOFORK on Solaris 11.4 as well. It is a part of POSIX-1.2024, but who knows how long until that becomes common.

I don't know if it is related to this particular case, but I found a possible race condition in _gpgme_io_pipe.
Between pipe and fcntl with FD_CLOEXEC, another thread may fork a process which keeps running.
It would be good to use pipe2 here:
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/functions/pipe.html

Another possible cause is... gpgme uses closefrom in GNU C library, if available. if it doesn't work well, it would be possible invoked gpg keeps waiting its input.

Here is my observation.