Comment by giraffe_lady

See my other comment I guess. My experience has been that a lot of the things that motivate beginners are out of reach without using a package. In ruby or python I can say hey just install this thing here's how. Even in JS, it's a bigger hurdle but I can show them npm. Lua has nothing as accessible as this.

Managing archives is not easier in my experience, for the format I teach. Students are not necessarily using the same packages, not all on the same OS, and familiarity with manually managing files cannot be assumed. Probably the majority of middle schoolers I teach do not have that skill coming into my class, high school maybe 50/50.