I suspect OP's issues are with his custom Lua stuff. In order to reply to this message with some facts, I just rebuilt my phd thesis for the first time in 17 y

I suspect OP's issues are with his custom Lua stuff. In order to reply to this message with some facts, I just rebuilt my phd thesis for the first time in 17 years using a modern TeXLive with nary a LaTeX issue. The only effort needed was to re-learn my own work flow and to install some old tool I used to post-process the PostScript. I'd hazard that LaTeX has better shelf life, in terms of rebuilding, than say C.