Kind of surprising if no one picked it up when it's so actively used by major projects (like neovim and others). It blocks using more recent Lua for them.
That's fine. Freezing it at 5.1 (with some extensions) makes it stable. Not every language needs to move at the neck-breaking speed of, say, Javascript, pulling in every trend and bad idea that comes along for the sake of staying hip and exploding with unnecessary complexity and bloat. We need small, simple, sane languages.
If you want to use a more recent Lua version, of course that's available. If you want to use LuaJIT then you know exactly what you're dealing with and that there won't be any weird surprises in the future.
Mike Pall is still active occasionally, but there has been little development since 2017 and nobody else seems to have picked up the ball (but someone out there prove me wrong!).
Kind of surprising if no one picked it up when it's so actively used by major projects (like neovim and others). It blocks using more recent Lua for them.