I was lurking in their mailing list for some time and they push back a lot, I’d even say they managed to create a culture of no-feature. Whether it was good or bad idk, because (as expected) some proposals sounded good to me, some so so. What makes Lua unpopular imo, beyond subjective trivialities, is that they break compatibility in every version and in fact they release flavors of the same core idea vs updates of a language. Also it is technical and not user-friendly for windows users, because luarocks (package manager) is unusable there unless you’re skilled in C build systems and are ready to fix these issues. I lost track of it at 5.3.

I think Lua would feel much better if it stopped at 5.2 (or even at 5.1, fixing the shortcomings in 5.1 way) and took care of what’s called ecosystem, emerging around its game popularity.