One or zero indexing is a question about domain and communication. In signal processing, it is quite normal to need a negative index (autocorrelations f.x.). Ada (and I believe Pascal and Julia) has supported for specifying the indexing type, which can then be selected to match the problem domain.
In LUA you can use the metatable functionality to implement 0 based indexes.
In Julia you can overload the array access operation too. There a packages which allow zero based indexing. Or even StarWars based indexing including the machete viewing order. https://github.com/giordano/StarWarsArrays.jl Julia's array interface has has functionality what the first/last index is, so you can use it in other peoples code. If they haer coded 1 as first index just make a pull request to fix it.
I tried to do that a while back and kept coming across corner cases that didn’t work. Is there a complete implementation of zero-based arrays for Lua available anywhere?
Maybe you should try it before passing judgement.