Describe the solution you'd like

Kind of related to #863. Per https://pyo3.rs/v0.25.1/free-threading.html this should be a simple opt-in, but we may have struggles with Python Protobuf (have to confirm they are free-threading compat too). Need to research first and confirm findings and what we'd have to do if it's anything significant. We will also need to have CI-based confirmation of our compatibility with a free-threading runtime.