While everything you said there is true, it is a matter of taste for me. I prefer working with PUC Lua over LuaJIT. The speed improvement of LuaJIT doesn't matter for me, the only thing I miss from it is the FFI. I wish PUC Lua had the same FFI interface tbh.
It does. https://github.com/q66/cffi-lua
One of these days I'll port OpenResty to use PUC Lua and this FFI.
Totally valid choice to make, but in my opinion OP is missing out. OpenResty is state of the art and has a ton of great libraries embedded in it. It's "batteries included" so to speak, and the batteries are well designed. Yichun Zhang is one of the GOATs, along with Mike Pall. And Roberto, obviously.