My uninformed outsider's impression is that Mike Pall wasn't really widely successful at getting funding for the work he wanted to do on Luajit (e.g. new GC) – despite being probably the world's foremost JIT for dynamic languages expert[1] and the mileage that many extremely wealthy companies seem to have gotten out of luajit (e.g. I understand it plays a pretty important role in your firewall logic, and probably not one that would be easily replaced with some other technology).
I don't mean to single Cloudflare out for criticism, I'm aware that you have in fact funded Mike's work in the past. And maybe there is absolutely no relationship between Mike moving on and funding for luajit.
But since you replied here, I'd be genuinely interested to hear your perspective on this:
To me it appears that apparently even single-developer open source projects which directly affect the bottomline of large companies can struggle to make enough money to continue their work. Why is this?
[1] Seeing how he essentially single handedly wrote a JIT that seems superior in many respects to what the likes of Google have managed to achieve with Javascript after many lifetimes' worth of top developer effort.