finally, someone did it! luarocks was never an intuitive solution, and I feel this unintuitive ecosystem is one of the reasons for lua's low adoption.
I think moreso is the complete lack of any "batteries included" whatsoever. Not even something so basic as sockets are supported by Lua's stdlib. The ecosystem has had to fill so many gaps and a lot of that is dependent on Leafo and LuaRocks.
I'm hoping the great mlua Rust crate will help build the ecosystem since now it's mostly trivial to build easily-distributable native Lua packages in Rust.