> To me locking means waiting which means greatly reduced performance. That is the whole reason why event-based systems like NGINX and node.js are so popular.

I think you've got it slightly wrong. What do you think happens when one request is being worked on in effectively one green-thread-equivalent in node.js? Everything else is blocked until the current operation yields. That's an equivalent of a GIL, yet it doesn't "reduce performance". If you switched to multithreading + locking (making it run in a M+N scheduling model), you'd gain performance, not lost it.