You should do a little more research into pico-8. Although its true that they aren't the same pico-8 has it's own set of artificial arbitrary execution cost and memory limitations that makes it a lot different than if you were using Love2D or LuaJIT embedded in an SDL2 app. Many things that should be trivial on a PC with effectively infinite resources are hard or impossible to do at frame rate on Pico 8.

The fantasy console that Pico 8 presents is still way more powerful in most ways than an NES though.

remember that pico-8 is a very limited fantasy console and only has:

32KB cartridges

32KB RAM

a 1MB RAM limitation for the lua VM