It seems that there should be a better way to handle this, but this seems to be the more common approach and it should likely get replaced in all of the places it happens... Basically, thread 1 is in the process of destroying the tun/tap while thread 2 is executing one of the ioctls that requires the tun/tap mutex and the mutex is destroyed before the ioctl handler can acquire it.
This is only one of the races described/found in PR 233955.
PR: 233955