While we're not perfect, I'm happy to defend this decision. ;-)

We did a ton of tracing and perf/memory captures to identify that string allocations were a significant drain in many locations in the code. We don't see those issues with our other uses of std:: (vector, unordered_map, set, etc.), just with std::string. So it was a logical place to do targeted optimization.

We did that optimization before lua because of the fact that there's a very clean way to make the foundational debt into MacGyver debt, since there's a trivial conversion between std::string and AString. Sadly we haven't been able to come up with any bite-sized moves that we can do to phase out the wasteful use of lua as kvp storage buckets. It's an all-or-nothing problem that makes it a much bigger chunk of work to undertake.