Alternately, an equivalent with the goal of providing an open source alternative.

The two can coexist. In addition, those who are interested in these will likely enjoy Uxn: https://100r.co/site/uxn.html

i spent a very happy month last year making a game with tic80. Honestly its better than pico8 for me: better aspect ratio, standard lua lib instead of a knock-off, and very stable etc

It is. But with less artificial restrictions. You can actually make decent-size games in it (without resorting to obscene amounts of hacking).

What an ignorant and unnecessarily dismissive comment. While Pico8 did kick off the popularity of "fantasy consoles", there are a number of them now, Pixel Vision 8 [1] would be another example.

TIC-80's specs [2] are different as well.

[1]:https://pixelvision8.github.io/Website/

[2]: https://tic80.com/learn

I'd advise you to get a deeper and better look at it before passing such comments.