Lua just doesn't have the marketing other languages have. No big corporation behind it. It does not have any exciting or frequent releases. It is basically don

Lua just doesn't have the marketing other languages have. No big corporation behind it. It does not have any exciting or frequent releases. It is basically done as a language since 5.1. New versions can be safely ignored, especially when you want to use LuaJit. These days people simply expect lots of churn and frequent releases to keep the hype for a language up. Also the current trend it towards static type checking which is especially hard to implement for Lua. There are some solutions for gradual typing but there is not exactly first-class support for that. The small standard library might also have been a problem in the past but these days I would argue that JS has normalized that part quite a bit.