Openresty is the most toxic, rude, entitled “community” I’ve ever experienced. And Lua is a garbage language stuck in the 1980s, used by people afflicted with NIH. Lua’s entire ecosystem is copy-n-paste hell.
Webserver centric DSLs have fallen by the wayside because it's limiting and pointless to pour -> too much <- application-layer/-level engineering into infrastructure-side engineering that can be more-or-less accomplished without it in performant backend application infrastructure using {C, C++, Rust, Go, Haskell, Erlang} or using cloud-native control-/data-plane configurability that makes it moot. The one of the keys to large-scale ops is striking a nuanced balance of engineering flexibility across the levels of both the application stacks and the network stacks.