When I right click in nautilus I have to close that menu before I can click anything not-nautilus.
It happens in every gnome application with 2 out of 3 mouse devices and it drives me nuts.
I still can't drag and drop if I alt-tab to a different window. All of these were introduced after 3.0, but have not been considered severe enough to fix.
"Can you tell me a use case for this?" for a feature for example present in every other DE. I forgot what the exact context was or I'd pull up the ticket. Something to do with the sorting of files from the header of the sort display or some such.
I have had so many focus issues on gnome that what I meant is that they should do a new take on the whole thing. The problem has gotten worse, not better, over the years.
It’s fairly normal to treat context menus as modals within their parent window. Not universal, but my feeling (which I don’t trust here) is that it has been generally preferred for quite some time. I think this has also become a stronger custom as popovers have become more common, and pure context menus have become less common. It then makes sense to formalise on that pattern. And then applying the modal-closing behaviour across all windows makes sense, even if it’s not the only reasonable option and you’d prefer not.
This happens on any GTK apps on KDE as well, so it seems to be a toolkit bug instead of compositor bug.
Apparently this happens only when you have a mouse that have those additional buttons that are exposed as a "keyboard" to the system :)