I had no idea that GoboLinux and htop were made by the same dev, let alone Teal. I can sort of see why someone who preferred to keep things simple and straightforward in a way that would lead to GoboLinux would also be involved in something directly related to Lua.

As for how light it is, I don't disagree with you that it's frustrating, but as someone who only started using it at the beginning of last year for making a mod, I've realized that in a lot of ways, it feels like it's JavaScript if it were designed properly from the start. Both use a single map data structure for everything, including having arrays be "maps with incrementing integer keys", but Lua anticipated that iteration for arrays should work differently made the loop syntax give you a way to specify which way you want. Neither has a particularly large set of APIs that are available out of the box, but Lua defined a module system from day one (I assume, I guess I don't know for sure) and even provides a way to use it as for defining objects; JavaScript has a prototypical inheritance system that's probably more complex than it ever needed to be, and it took decades for a standard way of importing things to be defined. Lua also doesn't have the famous warts of implicit type coercion for operators (including the more familiar looking of the two equality checks); I'd take arrays starting at 1 over that any day.

I don't love working in Lua, but given how unfathomable it is to me that so many people genuinely seem to enjoy JavaScript, Lua seems more than sufficient in terms of the language features at least.