It's more minimalistic, that's true. But there's nothing stopping you writing or downloading an array library so you can do this:
enemies = array.filter(enemies, function(e) return e.alive end)
enemies = enemies.filter(function(e) return e.alive end)
Due to the embedded nature of Lua, it’s often impossible or difficult to use libraries. And I don’t want to reimplement basic functionality every time I start a new project.
That seems like a contextual problem, not a Lua problem.
If you're in Love and/or control the environment you're free to bring in whatever libraries you want. Or to build your wrapper to support multiple files from the user.
Like you could suffer from a bad embedded scripting setup with any language. Granted if it was embedded Python or Javascript you would get a bit more for builtin if they embed a full implementation. But also embedding Lua with support for user supplied libraries is less effort than embedding a whole Python/JS runtime
> Due to the embedded nature of Lua, it’s often impossible or difficult to use libraries.
Last time I used LÖVE that wasn't the case, nor does it seem to be the case today, you can require libraries or even use LuaRocks if that is what you prefer, and everything just works.