It's a specialized data structure that the whole Lua ecosystem drives you to use as your primary collection type. They're blessed by the language, every library

It's a specialized data structure that the whole Lua ecosystem drives you to use as your primary collection type. They're blessed by the language, every library function will use will take and return them, and your deserializer will produce them, whether you like it or not. Ultimately, you can use different data structures in Lua... but you'll have to write reams of boilerplate to do it. That's why I'm saying that (unfortunately) it's Lua itself that's a bad fit, not just tables.